Flournoy: Boosting Civilian Capacity Will be a Primary QDR Focus

Flournoy: Boosting Civilian Capacity Will be a Primary QDR Focus

March 27, 2009 -- Building civilian capacity will be one of the main thrusts of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy said today.

The future environment will demand that the United States institutionalize and better resource capabilities for stability operations, said Flournoy, adding that the broader U.S. government must complement military capabilities. “This is going to be an area that I can assure you that the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review” will explore, she said. “It will be a main focus area for that.”

Bolstering this capacity will take substantial financial investment in the State Department and organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to a panel of stability operations experts who spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington with Flournoy.

The panel discussed Field Manual 3-07, the latest Army doctrine on stability operations that debuted last fall. The group included Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, KS; and Brookings' Janine Davidson. Davidson will be the deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans, according to a March 24 briefing given by Flournoy.

The event took place on the same day President Obama unveiled a new U.S. government strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan that aims to advance security, opportunity and justice in Afghanistan by tapping the expertise of agricultural specialists, educators, engineers and lawyers.

“And that's why I'm ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground,” Obama told reporters. “That's also why we must seek civilian support from our partners and allies, from the United Nations and the international aid organizations, an effort that Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton will carry forward next week in The Hague.”

Although the worsening economic crisis may tempt some to consider shortchanging the civilian effort, Obama warned that American initiatives will fail in Afghanistan and Pakistan if proper investments are not made. “And that's why my budget includes indispensable investments in our State Department and foreign assistance programs,” he said. “These investments relieve the burden on our troops. They contribute directly to security.”

During the Brookings' discussion, Flournoy emphasized the need to “put our money where our mouth is, and that means investing in the civilian capacities that are needed to be successful in these operations and in meeting these critical tasks."

In recent months, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has repeatedly expressed his support for similar investments in civilian capacity.

The administration's new strategy for Afghanistan will require the political will of Congress to invest in these initiatives, Flournoy told the audience.

Congress' first test will come when the administration submits a supplemental request for 2009, she maintained. Within that supplemental bill will be a substantial request for resources to build civilian capacity, she said, adding that these resources are "absolutely critical to succeed in Afghanistan."

"This will be an important opportunity and an important challenge to help Congress do the right thing and help start to invest in these capabilities, because this is really an immediate, critical need for a mission that involves a lot of U.S. interests," said Flournoy. "I'm hoping that this will begin to get off the ground as we move forward."

In the past, Congress has pushed back against requests to build more robust capabilities at the State Department, said the discussion moderator, Carlos Pascual, vice president and director for foreign policy at Brookings.

This approach will require the joint efforts of the president, the secretary of state and the defense secretary, Pascual urged. They must send a message that investing in these capabilities is “a national-security priority of the United States, and they have to go to the top of the list. This is the level that we're going to have to bring it to," he said.

In addition, Flournoy indicated that the QDR will address the question of how to resource and organize the U.S. military in the long term to advise and train foreign security forces. -- Kate Brannen and Fawzia Sheikh

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It's time to scrutinize the Pentagon

by Charles Knight, Carl Conetta, and James P. McGovern, Minuteman Media, 1 January 2009

There is nothing about the absolute size of a half-trillion dollar Pentagon budget that should concern Americans if that expenditure is necessary for the defense of the nation and if, as a nation, we are rich enough to foot the bill. But in the shadow of 9/11 and subsequent wars, that budget has been exempted from the type of scrutiny it received during the 1990s. Still, it constitutes so much of our discretionary spending and has contributed so much to our deficit spending that we can no longer afford to look the other way.

The last 10 years have seen the Pentagon's "baseline budget" grow by 45 percent - from $358 billion in 1997 to $518 billion today, not including much of the funding for current wars and for Homeland Security.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the baseline budget will grow another $30 billion in coming years. And it has been reported that the Bush administration will pass on to the Obama administration a revised five-year defense plan which will push the budget up another $80 billion.

Surely our national security needs are real and enduring. But there also is an immediate need to shore-up our economy and to speed relief to Americans facing hard times. Americans of all ages also want reform of the healthcare system in order to improve access to quality care and to make it more affordable. We need diverse educational investments and major investments to reduce energy dependence and to curb global warming.

Meanwhile, America is slipping further into recession, likely the worst since the 1930s. The next several years are expected to add several trillions of dollars to our already outstanding national debt of $10 trillion. As debt rises relative to revenue and new demands on the budget loom, we simply must use our resources judiciously. With millions of American households facing their own budget crises, the next Congress will be expected to exercise more vigilant oversight of the government budget, the Pentagon's included.

Since 1998 we have spent about $5 trillion on defense (in 2008 dollars), $1.4 trillion more than the 1998 level. About $800 billion (57 percent) of this increase was devoted to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Ending them would dramatically reduce the demands on the Pentagon. The remaining $600 billion (43 percent) are additions to baseline spending. There is much in that figure that deserves closer scrutiny.

For example, we are currently adding nearly 100,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps. These two services have suffered due to the long occupation of Iraq. But the increase is designed to be permanent. And this part of the plan begs fundamental questions: What have we learned from our Iraq experience? Is long-term, large-scale military occupation of a foreign country a worthwhile or even practical road to greater security?

Apart from our current wars, the United States maintains a very large military presence abroad. Even in peacetime we keep more than 200,000 personnel on foreign soil and 30,000 sailors on more than 100 deployed ships and submarines. No other nation does remotely as much. And we are planning to do more - with the recent addition of a new regional military command covering Africa. Is this the best, most cost-effective way to influence world events? Or might more be done at less cost and more effectively through the State Department and through regional and global institutions?

Finally, the Pentagon hopes to renovate U.S. nuclear capabilities, proceed with national missile defense efforts, and explore the potentials of anti-satellite and space-based weapons. But these efforts are plagued by questions about their effects on international stability and on arms control, and about their feasibility and reliability. In the case of nuclear weapons, perhaps the best course is to retire much of our stockpile in tandem with reductions by other nuclear powers.

Any adjustment in national security planning is bound to be controversial - and it should be. But we can no longer afford to shy away from that controversy. Our current circumstance demands that we enter into a broad and deep discussion about national strategic priorities, including security priorities. And this necessarily entails looking behind the curtain that shields the defense budget from more serious scrutiny.

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Charles Knight and Carl Conetta are co-directors of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Rep. James P. McGovern represents the 3rd Congressional District of Massachusetts.

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original source:

http://www.minutemanmedia.org/KNIGHT%20CONETTA%20MCGOVERN.htm

Dust-up between the New York Times and the White House masks willful ignorance

by Charles Knight, opednews.com, 13 December 2008

The recent dust-up between the New York Times and the White House over whether "faulty intelligence" caused the Bush government to invade Iraq only serves to perpetuate a misleading narrative that seeks to shift the blame for a disastrous American war.

Citing a recent interview that President Bush did with Charlie Gibson in which Bush said, "The biggest regret of the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," the New York Times editorial on 7 December 2008 said:

After everything the American public and the world have learned about how Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated Congress, public opinion and anyone else they could bully or lie to, Mr. Bush is still acting as though he decided to invade Iraq after suddenly being handed life and death information on Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

The next day the White House responded by saying, in part,

As the President has stated, he regrets the intelligence was wrong, but it was intelligence that members of Congress, foreign governments as well as the Administration all believed to be accurate.

So the narrative of blame continues -- all the while avoiding a much more sorry truth. Not only did the Bush White House lie and manipulate (for original source documentation see the "secret British memos" collected here,) but Congressional leaders -- including many prominent Democrats -- and leading organs of the mainstream media were all too willing to join the march to war and turn a blind eye to ample evidence of doubt. If Congress and the media were ignorant of the truth about Iraq's weaponry, it was willful ignorance.

In late 2002 and early 2003, I did my own assessment from open sources.

For a study called "First Strike Guidelines: The Case of Iraq," first published in September 2002, I consulted dozens of reports, both official and unofficial, on Iraqi weapons programs. In particular, I want to call attention to a thorough and careful assessment by independent British analyst Glen Rangwala -- "Claims and evaluations of Iraq's proscribed weapons," University of Cambridge, U.K., 05 February 2003. Six years later it is worth another look.

Not only were independent researchers such as myself and Rangwala finding it extremely doubtful that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, reported to the Security Council on March 7, 2003, just days before the invasion, that,

After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.

All these official and unofficial assessments were readily available to the press and to members of Congress, not to mention the national security staff in the White House. 

Neither "intelligence failure" nor "manipulation" begin to describe what happened to the judgment of the leaders of our government and of the mainstream American media at the time. The record will show that few of these powerful actors really cared about the facts at the time. They were ready for war-making and the facts would simply have to fit their inclinations. Today their excuses and recriminations simply don't hold with the evidence. 

Original content at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dust-up-between-the-New-Yo-by-Charles-Knight-081213-545.html

Meeting the Enemy with Serious Talks of Extraordinary Scope

by Charles Knight, opednews.com, 5 January 2009

Consider this scenario. The president's national security advisor has flown off to a distant capital to meet with the supreme leader of an enemy state. After reassuring his host that the U.S. does not seek permanent bases, the U.S. envoy says:

So that the mere fact that we are sitting in this room changes the objective basis of the original intervention.... For us who inherited the war our problem has been how to liquidate it in a way that does not affect our entire international position...

We have attempted to separate the military outcome from the political outcome so that we can disengage from the area and permit the local forces to shape their future.

No, those are not the words of James Jones, President Obama's national security advisor, meeting with President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Rather, equally improbably, those are the words of Henry Kissinger meeting with Zhou Enlai in June of 1972 (transcript at the National Security Archive - http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/HAK%206-20-72.pdf )

Although the term "rogue state" had not yet been invented in 1972, "Red China" had been the object of fear-mongering in the American press since the Korean War and was, if anything, more of a pariah nation than Iran is thirty-seven years later. Few Americans at the time could quite imagine the President's chief national security advisor sitting down for a heart to heart talk with the leadership of such a state.

But in 1972 Kissinger was making his second trip for secret talks with the Red Chinese leadership. Thirty-seven years later, when the U.S. once again has its troops seemingly stuck in an unending conflict in a distance land, the transcripts of that meeting with Zhou Enlai make for fascinating and instructive reading.

Kissinger's visit to Beijing shows us the wide and daring scope of diplomacy that may be pursued in service of ending an unfortunate war. What is remarkable is how much Henry Kissinger, representing the most powerful nation on earth, concedes to the Chinese in an effort to gain their help in getting the North Vietnamese to be more responsive negotiators.

Kissinger distances himself from the harsh statements directed at the Chinese by the Johnson administration. He states directly that the U.S. can live with a communist Vietnam, insisting only that the U.S. can not be expected to overthrow its sponsored allies in the south. He clarifies for Zhou that the U.S. expects to withdraw all of its troops from Vietnam and leave no bases behind. Rather directly he is asking the Chinese to persuade the North Vietnamese to allow the U.S. to leave Vietnam with modicum of dignity and plausible denial that they are abandoning an ally.

The US exit from Iraq can be less demanding. The Iranians look rather favorably on the current Iraqi government and probably would object to our abandoning it. What we need from the Iranians is their help in persuading the Shia-dominated Iraqi government to make peace and share proportionate power with the Sunni minority which will only happen in the context of regional rapprochement of Iraq's neighbors including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. Iranian cooperation is essential to making this possible.

What will the Iranians want? Much like the Chinese they will insist on an end to sanctions and a commitment for diplomatic recognition and normalization. What about their nuclear program? Much like the arrangement made thirty-seven years ago regarding the status of Taiwan, the US will need to "agree to disagree" and accept the ambiguous meaning of Iranian nuclear development with a silent understanding that Iran will not weaponize its knowledge and materials.

Many in the US will argue that the Iranian government does not deserve such treatment, but it is likely that such is the price of Middle East stability and peace after Bush's strategic blunder with the Iraq war.

This commentary is not an exercise in drawing analogies between the particularities of Iraq and Vietnam. Nor is it principally about similarities in the strategic context. Rather it invites us to imagine President Obama's Assistant for National Security Affairs or Secretary of State sitting down for serious talks of extraordinary scope with one or more of the leaders of present day 'enemy' nations in the Middle East.

I am reminded that there was extraordinary suffering in store for the people of Vietnam and Cambodia (and, for that matter, U.S. soldiers and their families) for years after the Kissinger-Zhou talks took place. I hope we have the will and imagination for talks in Iran and the surrounding region that will yield better outcomes for the people of the region.

Charles Knight is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives - http://www.comw.org/pda/

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Original content at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Meeting-the-enemy-with-ser-by-Charles-Knight-090105-777.html

Bush Surveillance Policies Live On In Obama White House

The new president has changed his tune from the campaign trail on some surveillance policies.

Saturday, March 21, 2009
by Shane Harris

It was February 12, 2008, and then-Sen. Barack Obama faced an easy vote. The Senate was about to take up the hotly debated question of whether telecommunications companies should be exempt from civil lawsuits alleging that they helped the Bush administration illegally spy on Americans. Opponents of the terrorist surveillance program, which bypassed federal law calling for court-approved search warrants for such eavesdropping, brought the suits, and Obama agreed with the litigants that if companies broke the law -- regardless of the assurances they received from the government that their participation was lawful -- they should be held to account. Obama's opposition to the so-called immunity provision during his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination solidified his support among liberal activists, the technologically savvy Net-roots of his party, and burnished his anti-Bush bona fides.

The Senate took up the controversy that morning, as an amendment to a pending bill that would modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. (This was the law that the litigants accused the administration of violating.) The proposed revisions to FISA would dramatically expand the government's surveillance capabilities, giving it greater leeway to conduct surveillance of terrorism suspects and other foreign groups without obtaining individual search warrants from the FISA court. The communications of American citizens would undoubtedly be caught up in that electronic dragnet. Whether the immunity provision should be part of this new law was on the table. Obama voted to remove it, putting him at odds with the majority of his colleagues.

So, with the Senate in support of immunity, that left the question of whether Obama would oppose the overall changes to FISA, which the Senate took up later the same day. When the moment came to cast his vote, however, Obama didn't vote at all. He was one of three senators to take no position; the others were Hillary Rodham Clinton, then his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, voted for the bill.

Obama had seemingly backed off his opposition to Bush-era surveillance policies. His position was challenged again a few weeks later when the candidate's top intelligence adviser said in an interview with National Journal that he personally favored immunity for the telecom companies. John Brennan's remarks ignited controversy, and some of Obama's supporters called upon the candidate to dismiss him. That would affirm, they seemed to think, Obama's loyal opposition to the legislation moving through Congress, which Brennan, in the interview, said had become "embroiled now in a partisan debate in some quarters."

Obama was still on record against immunity and through a spokesperson confirmed that he thought the companies' liability was "more appropriately a decision for the judiciary."

In July, almost five months after the immunity vote, Obama finally had to face the music. The Senate took up another FISA-changing bill, which the House had passed. It included immunity, and it would give the government broad authority to monitor communications outside the traditional search-warrant process. Sixty-nine senators voted in favor of the bill. Obama was one of them. President Bush signed the bill into law the next day.

No Turning Back

Candidate Obama's reversal on warrantless surveillance was the first major break with his most loyal supporters, and it remains a sore spot during the first months of his presidency. On his second full day in office, Obama earned some goodwill among the base by issuing two important executive orders. One would close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year (although the fate of the nearly 250 prisoners there remains very much in question), and the other requires the CIA to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. That order effectively barred waterboarding, a harsh interrogation technique that intelligence officials say was rarely used but that many experts say is torture, and certainly was a potent symbol of past policies that Obama wanted to cleanly break from.

But on the hot-button issue of surveillance, Obama has shown no intention to turn back or break in a new direction. Indeed, most of what the Bush administration did under the cover of secrecy is now legal under the surveillance law that Obama voted for last summer, seven weeks before he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. Obama has chosen Brennan, his onetime intelligence adviser and telecom immunity supporter, to be his chief homeland-security and counter-terrorism adviser in the White House. And in January, a federal Appeals Court strengthened Obama's hand when it published its opinion that the executive branch can claim an exemption to the Fourth Amendment's requirement for a court-ordered search warrant. If the government is monitoring the communications of foreigners overseas, it need not seek a warrant to do so, even if Americans are a party to those communications, the court ruled. When it comes to his surveillance authorities, then, Obama has clear sailing ahead of him and the wind at his back.
The opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review -- only the second in the history of this panel, which was set up to review FISA-related cases -- doesn't settle the issue of whether President Bush violated the law when he authorized warrantless surveillance after the 9/11 attacks. Nor does it give Obama free rein to target Americans directly without search warrants. The law for which he voted forbids it. "This was not a blank check by any means," legal scholar Orin Kerr wrote of the court opinion and its implications for future presidents.

Steven Schwinn, an associate professor of constitutional law at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, also stressed that the court opinion applies only to surveillance activities that Congress has specifically authorized in the various FISA acts. "It said nothing about the president's inherent Article II power to authorize the secret surveillance program," Schwinn wrote. (Bush had asserted an "extravagant" interpretation of his constitutional surveillance authorities, according to former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, who threatened to resign in 2004 over aspects of the surveillance program that he believed could not be supported by law.) "Bush administration supporters who praise this opinion as a vindication of Bush's sweeping claims of inherent Article II powers simply misread the opinion," Schwinn wrote.

But just because Obama's berth is wide doesn't mean it's free of conflict. The legal opinions justifying warrantless surveillance remain secret. And electronic privacy and civil-liberties groups are still pressing the president to circumvent the immunity provisions that he ultimately voted for, a potentially tricky legal maneuver that would also hold tremendous political consequences. Both McCain and Clinton questioned whether candidate Obama had the requisite experience and fortitude to fight a global war on terrorism; in that conflict, surveillance has been one of the United States' primary weapons.

The Legacy Question

Obama faces pressure from his base to make a demonstrable turn away from Bush-era policies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for one, wants the administration to put the civil lawsuits against the telecommunications companies back in play. Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the group, said that could happen in any one of a few ways, all of which involve the new attorney general, Eric Holder.

First, Obama could tell Holder to simply withdraw the government's current motion to dismiss the lawsuits based on the immunity provision, reversing course from the Bush Justice Department. Or, Obama could tell Holder to ask the courts to temporarily stay the proceedings while the administration comes up to speed on the cases and awaits the findings of several inspectors general, whose reports on the warrantless surveillance program are expected in July.

But there is a third route, Bankston said. Obama could instruct Holder not to appeal a case that Bankston's group brought last December before a federal District Court judge. It argues that the immunity provision violates constitutional separation of powers because the attorney general -- not a judge -- gets to determine unilaterally that any warrantless surveillance was both lawful and deemed necessary to protect national security. If the attorney general says that the surveillance met those criteria, then by law a judge must dismiss any lawsuit against a telecom company.

It's doubtful that the judge who is pondering the case will pick that fight with the new administration. Judge Vaughn Walker, the chief judge of the Northern District of California, heard oral arguments before Obama nominated Holder. "Why shouldn't the court wait to see what the new attorney general will do?" the judge asked.

During his confirmation hearing, Holder gave the response.

"President-elect Obama was against the [immunity provision]," he said, "but nevertheless voted for the statute that contained that immunity." The immunity question is now a matter of law, Holder said, and "the duty of the Justice Department is to defend statutes that have been passed by Congress, unless there is some very compelling reason not to.

"It would seem to me," he continued, "that unless there are compelling reasons, even given the opposition ... I don't think that we would reverse course."

That could well be the new president's guiding mantra when it comes to his broad, and now legal, surveillance powers.

This is the ninth in an ongoing series looking at an issue on President Obama's agenda. The entire series can be found at NationalJournal.com/agenda. Next week: Criminal justice.

Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars

by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 15 March 2009

WASHINGTON — The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.

To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.

A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama.

In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made it clear that the Pentagon was beginning to reconsider whether the old two-wars assumption “makes any sense in the 21st century” as a guide to planning, budgeting and weapons-buying.

The discussion is being prompted by a top-to-bottom strategy review that the Pentagon conducts every four years, as required by Congress and officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review. One question on the table for Pentagon planners is whether there is a way to reshape the armed forces to provide for more flexibility in tackling a wide range of conflicts.

Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.

Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with “a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct.”

“We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security,” Mr. Donnelly said. “The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa.”

But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. “If there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews,” he said, “it is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning.”

It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will “need to rebalance our strategy and our forces” in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.

Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist policy organization, said that senior Pentagon officials knew that the new review needed to more fully analyze what the rest of the government could bring to national security.

“We have Gates and others saying that other parts of the government are underresourced and that the DoD should not be called on to do everything” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “That’s a good starting point for this — to ask and at least begin answering where it might be better to have other parts of the government get stronger and do a bigger share, rather than the Department of Defense.”

Among the refinements to the two-wars strategy the Pentagon has incorporated in recent years is one known as “win-hold-win” — an assumption that if two wars broke out simultaneously, the more threatening conflict would get the bulk of American forces while the military would have to defend along a second front until reinforcements could arrive to finish the job.

Another formulation envisioned the United States defending its territory, deterring hostility in four critical areas of the world and then defeating two adversaries in major combat operations, but not at exactly the same time.

The Bush administration’s most recent strategy, completed four years ago, added requirements that the military be equipped to deal with a broad range of missions in addition to war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending American territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing terrorists and adversaries from obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

But Pentagon officials are now asking whether the current reality, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already outlasting World War II, really fits any of those models. “One of the things that stresses our force greatly is long-duration operations,” the senior Pentagon official said. “It’s the requirement to continue to rotate forces in over many, many rotations that really strains a lot of the force.”

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citation: Thom Shanker, "Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars," New York Times, 15 March 2009.

URL (15 March 2009): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/washington/15military.html

Deputy Pentagon Comptroller: Wait Until FY-11 Budget for Major Changes

March 11, 2009 -- A senior Pentagon budget official today attempted to lower expectations for dramatic policy shifts in the fiscal year 2010 budget request that will be released in the coming weeks, noting that significant changes will be made in the Obama administration's second defense spending request in 2011.

DOD officials intend to cut procurement in the FY-10 budget by 2 percent or 3 percent, according to Kevin Scheid, the Pentagon's deputy comptroller. However, more substantial programmatic cuts or adds will be influenced by the Quadrennial Defense Review and implemented beginning with the FY-11 request, due to Congress in February 2010.

“The administration will make . . . a partial statement with the FY-10 [budget's] details, but the full statement will be really communicated in the FY-11” budget, Scheid said today during a presentation at an Aviation Week-sponsored conference in Washington.

The Pentagon has a $1.7 trillion major defense acquisition program portfolio. That figure accounts for costs accrued during the life spans of major weapons systems, which for some programs date back decades. To date, only about $800 billion has been spent, according to Scheid; another $552 billion was included in the Bush administration's future years defense plan projections for the next five years. The remaining $480 billion lies outside that five-year time frame.

“When the new team is looking at our strategic modernization programs . . . we would look at the systems that have little sunk cost and are inconsistent, perhaps, with the new strategy that the [defense] secretary and the president are articulating -- and those would be vulnerable programs,” Scheid said. “Programs that we have a major sunk cost and they are consistent with the strategy, those would be ones that we would continue.”

The FY-11 budget will contain “major muscle movements” both “positive and negative” and influenced by the QDR, he said. At the same time, the FY-10 budget request -- which is expected to be unveiled the week of April 20 -- will not include outyear numbers because QDR work is just beginning. Gates has accelerated the Pentagon's QDR build.

“I think it's just going to be a topline and we'll work the details in the FY-11” budget, Scheid told a small group of reporters after his presentation when asked about FYDP projections in the FY-10 budget plan. “I don't think you'll see the procurement [and research, development, test and evaluation] numbers in the FYDP.

“The secretary has asked . . . to hold the FYDP as a place holder in this one instance so that we can do a review and make the strategic trade offs that we need to make in the coming months,” he added.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made it clear he does not want to do “salami-slice” budgeting, but will instead review the budget in a strategic manner, according to Scheid.

One area that could see a spending increase is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Gates has been a staunch proponent of using ISR assets in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Some of big ideas that are rattling around in the [Pentagon] include this notion of . . . having to go after individuals versus armies,” Scheid said. “We've really geared our intelligence systems in the past, and a large part today, to go after . . . large conventional armies.

“We now need systems, and we have invested in systems and are developing them to go after individuals, go after small cells, groups, urban targets. That requires a different type of intelligence approach,” he added, noting the Pentagon's investment in Air Force Predator and Reaper ISR- and strike-capable drones.

DOD also plans to invest in partnership capacity building in its upcoming budget, Scheid said, citing the Pentagon's commitment to building the Iraqi and Afghan military, as well as reducing the number of “ungoverned territories” in different parts of the world, like Pakistan.

“There are investments that we're making in this area in the upcoming overseas contingency investment, or the global war on terror investment,” he said.

Another area being examined by DOD budget officials is fuel cost coffers. The Pentagon spends about $10 billion per year on fuel for its aircraft, ships and trucks. Roughly half of that money goes toward jet fuel. Over the past five years, the price of oil has fluctuated wildly.

“We're experiencing a little bit of relief with the decline in the price of oil when we budgeted for a higher level,” Scheid said. “A lot of our overseers are now looking at that as maybe we should rescind those funds [or] maybe we should do something else with those funds. That has not been decided yet, [but] those options are on the table, which will of course bring down our topline, tighten up our budget a bit.”

The Pentagon's $513 billion FY-09 budget includes $181 billion for procurement and research, development, test and evaluation. Aircraft, ground systems and mission support equipment accounts for the bulk of those funds. -- Marcus Weisgerber

Fate Of The Future Combat System

DEFENSE
Fate Of The Future Combat System
With a new administration and a worsening economy, there is unprecedented pressure to trim the complex and expensive program.

Saturday, March 14, 2009
by By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
If the Army must be ready for both high-intensity combat and low-intensity counterinsurgency, what is to become of the service's main modernization program, the awkwardly named and hugely expensive Future Combat System?

With a new administration and a worsening economy, there is unprecedented pressure to trim the complex program -- originally envisioned as an integrated set of armored vehicles and aerial and ground robots, plus a mobile computer network with 95 million lines of code to coordinate their operations.

The idea was first outlined by then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki in 1999. The problem then to be solved was how the Army could deploy heavy forces in time to stop, say, Iraqi aggression in Kuwait in 1990 or Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, both situations in which hostile nation-states with Soviet-built tanks were able to move faster than the Pentagon could. Gen. Shinseki sold the FCS as a rapidly deployable replacement for the Army's main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, which was too heavy to be flown in large numbers to a crisis spot. The FCS would use advanced technology to cram all of the firepower and protection of 70-ton heavy tanks into 20-ton vehicles light enough to be airlifted en masse to trouble spots worldwide.

Slow, grinding wars against elusive guerrillas were not on the FCS agenda. But the original vision got one critical part of the future right: Watching urban sprawl envelop the planet, Army planners predicted that the FCS would have to fight its battles in cities. So they outlined an FCS brigade structure that incorporated not only long-range precision weapons to kill enemy tanks but also additional foot soldiers to fight house-to-house, armored personnel carriers to get them to the target under fire, and abundant unmanned systems -- flying drones, crawling robots, and static sensors -- to scope out hidden enemies, with a computerized communications network to coordinate it all.

Those same four components -- armor, infantry, drones, and networks -- have proved vital in city fighting in Iraq. So it might seem that the FCS would be perfect for hybrid warriors.

The problem, however, is that for years the Army has played chicken with Congress over the $160 billion -- some say $200 billion -- FCS program. Capitol Hill chafed at the Army's insistence on treating the array as a single program: a single line item in its budget with a single contract. Lawmakers were also unhappy that the FCS was aimed not at modernizing existing Army units but at creating "FCS brigades" equipped for the most part with Future Combat System hardware. The Army argued that the program's 17 components were too interdependent for legislators to pick and choose and that because the FCS made up so much of the Army's modernization budget, the service had no alternative plan. To put the Army's argument bluntly: The Future Combat System is too big to fail and too tightly integrated to pick apart, so let us do what we want.

"If FCS were canceled, the Army does not really have a plan for the future, and it was so thoroughly integrated you couldn't kill any one piece of it because the whole thing would collapse," said Loren Thompson, a Lexington Institute analyst and a consultant for major defense firms. "That approach has turned from a form of protection to a liability. It simply isn't executable. I suspect the service will have to disentangle those elements."

Congress has proved increasingly willing to call the Army's bluff. In 2007, legislators forced the service to list one of the eight planned variants of the FCS's armored vehicles as a separate line item in its budget. Last year, the Army on its own announced it would accelerate some of the less ambitious robotics and buy them for existing light infantry units. In recent months, under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to control costs, the Army has hinted that it will cherry-pick the most promising of the eight FCS manned vehicles and use them to modernize existing heavy armored units. Instead of a "pure" FCS brigade, one congressional staffer said, "it sounds like they're headed for a future heavy brigade with a mix of FCS vehicles, current vehicles, and Strykers," an armored vehicle with huge tires that has been effective in Iraq.

As for the sprawling FCS program, it should be divided into three parts, like Gaul, the staffer said, voicing a sentiment not uncommon around Washington. "You could pursue the vehicle variants under one R&D program because you have a common chassis," he argued. "The [computer] network, I think, just needs to be a separate program. [And] the robots and such, those could be separate programs. If they end up being useful, great, buy them for the entire Army. I think they could stand or fail on their own."

As for the FCS's brigade design, applying it to current armored units would give them almost 20 percent more foot soldiers -- the truly decisive weapon in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The Army's program makes sense in both the organization and the equipment," Frank Hoffman, a retired marine with no dog in the Army's fight, said of the Future Combat System. "I think the Army's right for the wrong reasons. They may have thought this thing was designed for high-end warfare, but it turns out to be the best posture for the medium."

The Military's New Hybrid Warriors

DEFENSE
The Military's New Hybrid Warriors
Some military analysts predict that future forces will increasingly face a hybrid of 'conventional' and 'unconventional' warfare.

Saturday, March 14, 2009
by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
When you set out to win hearts and minds, sometimes you have to show up in a 70-ton tank.

Joseph Rosen commanded a company of 88 soldiers during the much-debated "surge" in 2007 that sent 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. During their first three months in Baghdad, Rosen's troops performed the kind of militarized community policing traditionally used against insurgents, moving on foot and in Humvees among the local population. Then, in January 2007, they were reassigned to a mostly Shiite area. Their new sector was rife with the powerful roadside bombs called EFPs, short for explosively formed penetrators, that shot high-velocity slugs of molten copper that could gut even the latest up-armored Humvee.

"Our company had about 200 EFP strikes," Rosen, recently promoted to major, told National Journal. "We almost altogether abandoned our Humvees in favor of the tanks and Bradleys" -- M2 Bradley fighting vehicles -- "because they could survive the EFP hit, for the most part."

The only soldier killed in action in his company was riding in an up-armored Humvee. But some roadside bombs were powerful enough to kill his men even inside a 35-ton Bradley troop carrier. So Rosen routinely led his patrols with the 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. His unit never fired the M1's main cannon, but the troops needed its armor to soak up explosions. "We were willing to accept a hit on the tank before we'd accept a hit on a Bradley," Rosen explained. The M1 "definitely could sustain hits -- not to say that we didn't lose any tanks."

Rosen and his soldiers were not waging the "high-intensity" armored blitzkriegs across open ground for which the M1 tank was built. They were executing classic urban counterinsurgency tactics. Living in a small, single-company outpost in a Baghdad neighborhood, they went out every day for a year to talk to residents, search houses, and conduct raids. But their experience contradicts the notion that such a "low-intensity" conflict is not lethally violent. Mortars hit Rosen's outpost day after day for months on end. Roadside bombs made it too dangerous to go out the front gate on foot. And the Iraqi informants on whom Rosen relied for intelligence risked death, or worse: After the teenage daughters of one friendly Iraqi were murdered, Rosen would meet with an informant only after cordoning off the entire block with armored vehicles and then sending troops into every house to talk with every family, so that watching militia members could not tell who the Americans' real source was.

Rosen was waging the "war among the people" prescribed by counterinsurgency theorists. It was just that to survive long enough to build those relationships he had to ride down the street in 70 tons of steel. His experiences, like those of many other Iraq veterans, blur the lines between the U.S. military's new-school emphasis on counterinsurgency and its traditional focus on combat power. Washington should pay heed.

The Great Debate

As the fighting in Afghanistan escalates, seemingly as fast as the war in Iraq winds down, policy makers remain badly divided over what kind of military America needs. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has blasted the Pentagon bureaucracy for what he calls "next-war-itis." Instead of prioritizing expensive, long-term weapons programs to prepare the force for high-tech, firepower-intensive but essentially conventional conflicts against nation-states sometime in the future, Gates wants to focus on quicker, cheaper fixes for the low-tech, manpower-intensive guerrilla wars that the United States is fighting now. Traditionalists respond that the all-consuming demands of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq have already left the military unprepared for very different threats, such as North Korean nuclear brinkmanship or Chinese pressure on Taiwan, that could erupt at any time.

Some of today's dividing lines follow old interservice rivalries. The Marine Corps has a 200-year tradition of waging "small wars" against irregular enemies, while the Air Force and Navy historically fight well-armed nation-states -- after all, Al Qaeda has no aircraft carriers. But the debate splits the Army down the middle.

The Army is increasingly schizophrenic. It is spending an estimated $70 billion to recruit, train, and equip 65,000 additional soldiers for six new brigades of light infantry -- low-tech foot sloggers best suited to guerrilla warfare -- while requesting $160 billion for 15 brigades' worth of high-tech armored vehicles designed for rapid deployment by air, the much-maligned Future Combat System. (See "Fate Of The Future Combat System.") At bases around the country, Army units struggle to find time to train in both traditional fighting skills and cultural sensitivity.

The divide is not just generational. Even veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan interpret their experiences in diametrically different ways. Some young officers become acolytes of Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the surge and the associated emphasis on the classic principles of counterinsurgency. Others, such as Col. Gian Gentile, a West Point instructor who fought in Baghdad in 2006, speak angrily of the decline in traditional combat skills.

In Iraq, Gentile told National Journal, "you go from a stiff, short little firefight to talking to the sheik or imam about what kinds of things he needs for his community, [like] laying new concrete on the street. So our platoons and companies could make a transition very quickly from counterinsurgency to a [high-intensity] conflict." But at higher levels, he said, commanders and their staffs spend their time managing occupied provinces from static headquarters. "If you told a division in Iraq, 'Hey, in two days, you're going to have to pick up all of your stuff and do [an attack] east into Iran,' those brigades and divisions haven't had to do anything like that for the last six or seven years."

Working with informants, reconstruction contracts, and local allies to secure one neighborhood at a time, as in the 2007 surge, is every bit as complex as coordinating tanks, infantry, artillery, and airpower advancing rapidly across an entire country, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the two skill sets are hardly interchangeable, and there are not enough hours in the day to master both.

"It's tough," conceded Maj. Mark Reeves, chief of operations at the Army's tank school at Fort Knox, Ky. "We're dealing with it here." Before his unit deployed to Mosul in 2006-07, "We really did very little maneuver at all with tanks and Bradleys because we just didn't have time," Reeves recalled. "In the last few years, our lieutenants and our captains have lost a lot of the skills, or never even really gained the skills... in how to conduct large-scale operations."

So if today's young officers had to switch suddenly from counterinsurgency to conventional combat, would they stumble as badly as their predecessors did when the blitzkrieg on Baghdad gave way to guerrilla warfare? "Probably, yes," Reeves said with a rueful laugh, "although it's easier, probably, to go from a counterinsurgency to a high-intensity conflict. In counterinsurgency, you don't know who the good guy is, who the bad guy is."

Nor will the next "conventional" war be a pristine duel in the desert like the Persian Gulf War, free of "unconventional" complications such as cities full of innocent civilians. "In Desert Storm, I don't think we worried too much about the media; we didn't worry too much about the local populace," said Reeves, a veteran of the 1991 war. "In the future, if we get into a high-intensity conflict, we'll have to worry about the things we have to worry about in Iraq."

Reeves is not alone in this prediction. A growing number of analysts and officers speak of the future as a blend of characteristics once neatly categorized as either "conventional" or "unconventional." One of the most prominent is Marine Gen. James Mattis. He's a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who now heads the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which is in charge of training and equipping all of the military services so that they work together. "We are not superior in irregular warfare," he said in a February speech in Washington. "And that's what we've got to be.... Really, we're going to have to be able to fight hybrid enemies."

Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine Reserve officer and leading "hybrid warfare" theorist who has briefed Mattis, says, "The current debate is terribly simplistic and counterproductive. I don't think we're likely to face clean-cut examples of anything. Preparing for hybrids is a better posture."

For the hybrid-war theorists, the most alarming model for the future is not America's struggles in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is Israel's 2006 defeat in Lebanon.

Hezbollah As Hybrid Threat

In July 2006, while the U.S. military struggled to contain sectarian violence in Iraq, the vaunted Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon. The Israelis had unilaterally withdrawn from southern Lebanon in 2000, hoping to end their slow bleeding at the hands of Hezbollah, but the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia had simply moved south to launch raids and rockets across the Lebanese-Israeli border. After six years of occasional but interminable casualties, both military and civilian, the Israelis struck back to silence Hezbollah's long-range rockets.

They failed. The rockets kept coming, in ever-greater numbers: more than 4,000 over the course of the 34-day war, an average of more than 125 a day. Escalating Israeli airstrikes punished Lebanese civilians without crippling the dug-in militia. And Israeli ground troops sent in to finish the job instead ran into unexpectedly stiff defenses; 119 of them died.

A militia best known for suicide attacks, such as the truck bomb that killed 241 U.S. marines in Beirut in 1983, Hezbollah had stood up to the Israelis in pitched battles after the regular armies of Arab states could not. "Hezbollah outperformed the Egyptians in 1956 and 1967, and the Syrians in 1967, in terms of the number of Israelis they were able to kill per combatant in fairly orthodox, conventional war-making," defense scholar Stephen Biddle said at a roundtable to discuss his study of the 2006 war. "They're as conventional as many states."

Well supplied by Iran and the black market, Hezbollah used high-tech weapons historically seen only in the arsenals of nation-states. Anti-tank guided missiles launched from ambush at long range knocked out Israel's 65-ton Merkava tanks, a vehicle equivalent to the American M1 Abrams. An anti-ship cruise missile crippled an Israeli corvette 10 miles offshore. Hezbollah even put weapons on their own remote-controlled drones, crude counterparts to the American Predator.

More important than the weapons were the skill and determination with which Hezbollah wielded them. "Somebody taught them to systematically lay out defenses," said Army Col. Patrick Lang, the retired chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section. Hezbollah had spent years preparing to stand and fight: building bunkers, digging tunnels, reinforcing civilian buildings, and selecting ambush sites along the Israelis' potential lines of advance. More than one analyst has compared the resulting web of well-hidden positions not to traditional guerrilla tactics but to the Japanese defense of Okinawa in World War II. And like the Japanese regulars, Hezbollah's militia members not only held their positions under heavy fire but even moved forward to stage some small-scale counterattacks, according to Biddle's study. Instead of brief flurries of gunfire in hit-and-run attacks, the Israeli officers who spoke to Biddle reported firefights lasting hours. "We're not talking IEDs and the occasional ambush," said Richard Sinnreich, a retired Army colonel. "We're talking about high-intensity fights."

By contrast, Israeli skills at conventional warfare had decayed. "Over the previous five years, the army had been engaged in a low-intensity urban conflict [in the occupied West Bank] and had retrained itself into sort of a large urban SWAT team," said Michael Oren, a professor at Georgetown University who, as an Israeli reservist, was himself called up in 2006.

After six years of counterinsurgency in Iraq, have U.S. forces lost their edge in the same way? Col. Gentile and officers like him fear that they have. Certainly, neither Saddam Hussein's regulars in 2003 nor the Iraqi insurgents since then have ever successfully stood their ground over a large area as Hezbollah did in southern Lebanon. But just like in Lebanon, the low-intensity conflict in Iraq has seen pockets of high-intensity fighting -- nowhere more so than in the city of Falluja in 2004.

Falluja And Beyond

The nature of a war can change from day to day and from place to place. Failure to recognize the difference can be fatal.

In November 2004, Marine Corps Maj. Kris Faught and his co-pilot were flying their Cobra attack helicopter over Falluja in support of slowly advancing U.S. ground troops. When the insurgents fire back at the helicopter, Faught recalled, the muzzle flashes "look like flashbulbs, like when you're at an air show and people are taking pictures" -- except they're not. Over most of the city, enemy fire was so intense that the helicopters could not fly low enough to fire their rockets or guns and had to rely on guided missiles instead.

As the battle raged, reinforcements flew in to help. "We were out of ammo; this other flight checked in [and I radioed], 'We're up here on 3,000 [feet], recommend you come up' -- they were down much lower," Faught recalled. "He just said 'Roger,' and then he started shooting." In minutes, the lower-flying newcomer was shot down -- and not by some lucky gunshot but by a heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile. (Amazingly, both crew members survived.)

"They were all very good, competent guys," Faught said, "but they had been used to flying around low because there's a much lower threat up at al-Asad," where the reinforcements had been operating before. "They came down to augment us during Falluja with four [helicopters] and lost two of them in the space of a day." When the reinforcements flew from al-Asad to Falluja -- a distance of less than 100 miles -- they had unwittingly moved from a low-intensity guerrilla conflict into something much closer to a high-intensity conventional war.

The ad hoc "Shura council" that coordinated the insurgents in Falluja lacked the clear hierarchy, strict discipline, and geographic reach of Hezbollah's defense of southern Lebanon. But on a smaller scale, at least some of the Falluja fighters showed just as much tenacity and skill. They used sewer tunnels to move unseen by U.S. spy drones overhead, knocked holes in the walls between adjoining houses so they could redeploy without exposing themselves in the street, shored up civilian houses with sandbags and bricks, and cached supplies in fallback positions around the city.

"As we got farther south, the fighting intensified," said Carin Calvin, a Marine captain and veteran of Falluja, "and you started running into blond-haired, blue-eyed insurgents," who were Chechens, Islamic radicals from the rebellious Russian province. "They had basically layered a defense so as they dropped back they had another house full of weapons, full of ammo." At some of these strong points, he said, "we had units pinned down for a couple of hours."

Falluja in November 2004 is the most famous hot spot in the Iraq war, a time and place -- like Hue in Vietnam in 1968 -- where an enemy that normally would hit and run instead stood and fought savagely for days. But there are countless other examples of localized high-intensity fighting in what is generally considered a low-intensity war. Like the 36 Israeli officers who spoke to Stephen Biddle about the 2006 Lebanon campaign, many of the more than 140 soldiers and marines who have spoken to National Journal for an ongoing oral history of Afghanistan and Iraq described stiff firefights lasting many hours. In these protracted battles, the enemy was subdued not by foot soldiers winning "hearts and minds" but by the full array of U.S. combat power: infantry and armor working closely together, backed by airpower and artillery.

As recently as June 2007, for example, Al Qaeda in Iraq felt strong enough to declare the city of Baquba the new capital of its "Islamic State of Iraq" and to make a Falluja-style stand. Dispatched to retake the city was one of the Army's six Stryker brigades, medium-weight forces that fall between traditional light infantry and heavy armor. These units' combination of 1,300 infantry -- more than in any other type of Army brigade -- and armored vehicles mounted on huge rubber tires that can travel long distances over dangerous roads have made them the favorite rapid-reaction force for U.S. commanders in Iraq. (The first Stryker brigade to deploy to Afghanistan will arrive there this summer.) A Stryker unit focused on reconstruction and institution-building in one area might have to pick up and move to an all-out battle in another.

"We moved around a whole lot," said Lt. Col. Adam Rocke, a battalion commander in the 3rd Stryker Brigade, but the Baquba mission was unique, "a pitched battle in an urban environment ... house to house, block by block, street by street." When Rocke's troops first attacked, he said, "in a day [of fighting], they would gain a couple blocks at most."

In addition to calling in artillery and airstrikes, the brigade augmented its namesake Stryker vehicles, relatively lightly armored 20-ton transports, with 35-ton Bradleys and 70-ton M1 tanks -- and even some of the M1s were destroyed in the battle. Baquba's defenders used weapons refined over years of guerrilla warfare, from roadside bombs big enough to kill a tank to entire houses rigged to blow up when Americans stepped inside. But they deployed these weapons not in isolated ambushes but in a citywide defense of territory they had claimed as their own.

This is not how guerrillas are supposed to fight -- in theory. In reality, insurgents throughout history have proven surprisingly capable of seizing and holding ground.

Vietnam As Hybrid War

Hours-long firefights between determined defenders and American armored vehicles hardly match the mental image of guerrilla warfare. The idea of counterinsurgency as all patrolling by light infantry, however, is a misreading not only of Iraq but even of Vietnam.

People tend to say that defeating an insurgency is all about hearts and minds, "but when you look at Vietnam, that's a hybrid war," said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and the author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. "You had the South Vietnamese guerrillas, the Vietcong, but you also faced NVA regiments" -- uniformed soldiers of the regular North Vietnamese army.

Those NVA units were tough and disciplined, said Col. Lang, who began his military intelligence career in Vietnam. "If you captured them -- and I captured a lot of them -- the Vietcong would sit around on the ground scratching themselves. The North Vietnamese army, they would stand up at attention, they all had their nice green uniforms and their pith helmets with a red star on the front, and they would say, 'Yes, sir; no, sir.' "

The differences went beyond appearance. "The NVA were much more persistent," Lang said. "If they were going to be anywhere more than a day or two, they were like the Roman army, they would start digging": first simple foxholes, then bunkers, then a whole ring of bunkers, then concentric circles of bunkers with machine guns sited to cover each other's flanks and mortars protected in the center. "I saw 52 [Americans] killed in one day trying to break into a position like that," Lang said.

The North Vietnamese regulars were capable of fighting as guerrillas, moving in small bands through the jungle to ambush or evade U.S. patrols. Indeed, as Communist casualties mounted, especially after the bloody Tet offensive of 1968, Hanoi sent ever larger numbers of regulars south to fill out decimated Vietcong units. But these same soldiers were also capable of coming together in large forces for pitched battles lasting days and weeks: Dien Bien Phu in 1954 against the French, Ia Drang in 1965, the Tet offensive and Hue City in 1968, and the Easter -offensive of 1972, when North Vietnamese tanks rolled down the main roads into the South. It was another such armored force, not guerrillas in sandals and black pajamas, that ultimately took Saigon in 1975.

At first, U.S. commanders wrote off Vietnam as a "little jungle war" best suited for light infantry on foot or in helicopters. But when American armored vehicles were deployed, they proved effective from Hue City to the Pleiku Valley. A study by retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales suggests that these armored troops took casualties at one-fifth the rate of the more exposed infantry fighting on foot beside them.

Hearts and minds certainly mattered in Vietnam, but so did brute combat power, on both sides. Like Lebanon in 2006 or Falluja in 2004, Vietnam was neither a purely guerrilla war among the people nor a purely conventional duel between regular armies but a hybrid of both. At least some forces that Western analysts dismissed as "irregular" or low-intensity threats proved capable of switching to more regular, high-intensity tactics when the time was right.

The reverse is true as well: The conventional armies of nation-states can adopt distinctly unconventional tactics. The Chinese in particular have a tradition of the same troops alternating between "regular" and "irregular" tactics that dates back to the warrior-sage Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C. In 1950, the People's Liberation Army surprised U.S. forces in Korea by crossing the Yalu River on foot in widely dispersed units with little heavy equipment; but once they had surrounded the unwitting Americans, the Chinese massed for a decisive fight, crushing U.S. "constabulary" units trained for peacekeeping in occupied Japan. Today, while U.S. hawks use the Chinese threat to justify big-ticket weapons, Chinese officers speak of neutralizing America's conventional power with "unrestricted warfare," combining everything from ballistic missiles to cyber-sabotage. Even the notoriously rigid Russians used civilian computer hackers and ragged Chechen paramilitaries to support their regular units in attacking Georgia last year.

"Is 'conventional' conventional anymore?" asked Rickey Smith, a retired Army colonel who works on future-warfare programs. "Will there ever be a time where you see something that's conventional the way we thought about it at the end of the Cold War? It's clear the answer is no."

In hindsight, the 1991 Gulf War was a fluke, kept pristinely "conventional" in part because U.S. civilian and military leaders cut the ground war short at 100 hours with the enemy largely intact. When the Army returned to Iraq a decade later to finish the job against Saddam, it found out that "conventional" could turn "unconventional" in a hurry.

Fluidity And Flexibility

On the morning of April 5, 2003, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz was waging all-out war. Wounded by shrapnel from an exploding Iraqi tank the day before, Schwartz led his battalion of armored vehicles in the first "Thunder Run" through the streets of Baghdad. "We were firing everything we could fire," recalled Schwartz, since promoted to colonel and awarded the Silver Star for valor. "Most tanks were hit by a rocket-propelled grenade of some sort. My tank personally that I was on was hit right in the soft spot between the turret and the hull with an RPG." So intense was the threat that he left his battalion's foot soldiers behind and kept the troops he did bring inside their armored vehicles and on the move -- except for one agonizing 21-minute pause to rescue the crew of a burning tank -- for the entire two-hour, 10-mile running battle through the city.

Six days later, on the morning of April 11, Schwartz looked out from his battalion's defensive positions in downtown Baghdad and realized that the fighting was over. After several days of ever-weaker Iraqi counterattacks, "it was like an epiphany," he said. "I realized exactly what was happening -- that we were transitioning from Phase III to IV, from 'major combat operations' to 'stability operations' -- and it was not good." Schwartz had 800 soldiers to secure one-third of Baghdad, a city of 9 million people, and no idea how to do it. "I didn't have a plan. I was not given a plan," he said. "That city erupted in a Mardi Gras fashion like you can't imagine, millions and millions of people that were looting everything."

The U.S. force that took Baghdad in a brilliant high-intensity campaign was unprepared to contain the low-intensity chaos that followed. But the next wave of U.S. troops went into Iraq expecting to do police work and reconstruction only to be caught off guard by an escalating insurgency.

"We thought the war was over, or some folks did," said Army Col. David Hubner, an old comrade of Schwartz's, who deployed to Iraq in early 2004. His battalion left most of its heavy armored vehicles behind, he said, but "we got in there and [then] Najaf cooked off, Falluja cooked off, Samarra cooked off, and we were in a fight. The decision was then made to bring a second company of tanks down."

The U.S. military's problem in Iraq was not only that it went in focused on conventional warfare and unprepared for counterinsurgency. The Pentagon was also caught out by the speed and fluidity with which a high-intensity conflict could turn into a low-intensity fight and then go high again.

Some analysts argue that the U.S. military needs to split the difference between high and low by splitting itself in two. "The current approach leaves you a rather mediocre jack-of-all-trades Army and a master of neither of these kinds of military operations," said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who now leads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Krepinevich calls for not only adding more light infantry units to the Army -- as the service is doing -- but also preparing those units for counterinsurgency by forming specialized "Security Cooperation Brigades" trained primarily to hunt guerrillas and support local allies. The remaining heavy armored forces would be able to focus their training on all-out combat. In a fluid situation like Iraq, the heavy brigades would go in first to smash the enemy defenses and the light brigades would follow swiftly in their wake to restore order, with a few heavies staying on to stamp out any Falluja-style outbreak.

But as stories like those of Schwartz and Hubner show, America's enemies can switch from high to low to high again faster than Krepinevich's bipolar Army could bring in the proper set of specialists. "The stability guy might get his clock cleaned and take some casualties if you get into a Hezbollah-like situation," said hybrid-warfare theorist Frank Hoffman, because the light infantry brigades would lack armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and the training for all-out battle. Conversely, a Krepinevich-style heavy force will end up "operating in an urban environment with a lot of noncombatants," Hoffman said, "and they're not going have the civil-affairs [specialists] or the training" to deal with civilians.

In 1997, Marine Corps Commandant Charles Krulak coined the term "the three-block war," which envisioned troops fighting fiercely on one block, policing a second, and conducting humanitarian relief on a third. In 2004, Marine Capt. Scott Cuomo experienced just that in Najaf. Over by the city's sprawling cemetery and its nearby mosque, a shrine treasured by Shiite Muslims around the globe, Shiite militia were fighting U.S. troops, with both sides using heavy weapons. "We dropped bombs right next to the mosque, precision-guided bombs.... We never touched the mosque," Cuomo recalled with pride. In return, he estimated, "our tank platoon was probably hit by a hundred RPGs [about 25 rocket-propelled grenades per tank]. We could leave those vehicles sitting in an intersection, and they would get pounded, and nothing would happen to them," he said. "If you put a Humvee in that position, it would have been destroyed." And yet, within earshot of the explosions, Cuomo went on, "there were also times when I was doing patrols in the middle of this, talking to people all of the time, handing out water bottles, handing out candy."

It is difficult to train, organize, and equip a military unit to do both of these missions simultaneously. But some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan say that it is unwise to expect the two missions to separate themselves so tidily in time and space that the military can assign a different, optimized force to each. The United States does not need light infantry specialized for low-intensity conflicts and heavy armor specialized for high-intensity war. It needs more armor in the infantry units, more infantry in the armor units, and, above all, the training for both to adapt to changing situations as quickly as the enemy does. Not every future conflict will be a hybrid war, but the future will require a new generation of hybrid warriors.

"What amazes me even to this day is the flexibility of the American soldier," Col. Hubner said. "We act, the enemy reacts, and we counteract -- and that's a continuous process."

Copyright c2009 by National Journal Group Inc.