daily links of interest

Murdoc Online: http://www.murdoconline.net/

Melanie Phillips's Diary: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/

Murdoc had a good post yesterday (June 30, 2005) and Madam Phillips as well.

re: "What scares me about Gitmo"

The following post is lifted from ongoing WebBoard discussions at Baen's Bar (www.bar.baen.com), which is hosted by the friendly folks at Baen Books. The writer, Julie Cochrane, is a co-author (with John Ringo) of "Cally's War."

Mdm. Cochrane is responding to Mr. Jonathan Briggs of Boulder, CO, in the "What scares me about Gitmo" thread in "Ringo's Tavern."

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Jonathan, historically all the protection any citizen outside of his own country has had against being held by a government that got its hands on him has been the protests of his own home country.

If his home country didn't care, he was hosed.

You may not like it, but that's historical reality.

People on drugs aren't blowing up our embassies, or buildings, or killing our ambassadors, or blowing up our ships, or killing our citizens abroad. Neither are poor people.

Yes, the War on Terror is vague, but it has had actual cassus belli acts, as opposed to Poverty and Drug issues. Poverty and drugs are social problems, and where they're not social problems, they're criminal problems. Drugs also involve smuggling problems. Smuggling is traditionally not regarded as a cassus belli.

The War on Terror is not a war against the IRA or ELF or the Weathermen or the Christian Identity or Posse Comitatus or The Order. It's a war against a specific sect of Islam. It's not vague at all--it's a Holy War, it's just politically incorrect to say so. The religion we're pushing is secular democracy and separation of church and state. It *is* a religion, but it's a religion with a "card slot" for the ritual and moral components of other religions, but only where they do not conflict with secular democracy and the separation of church and state.

Failing that, secular versions of other forms of government, with separation of church and state, that do not host the enemy in our Holy War, nor commit cassus belli acts against us, are acceptable to us.

Up until the "New World" era, the overwhelming majority of people in the overwhelming majority of nation states would have considered separation of Church and State insane. Secular government is a religion in that it took over a large chunk of territory that previously was firmly in the purview of religion. Even if the state religion was simply the religion of the head of state ala "l'estate, c'est moi."

The war is extremely well defined. We just can't admit it politically, because our Founding Fathers never contemplated that simply by virtue of our religious freedom and form of government being anathema to someone else's religion that we would become the target of someone else's Holy War--which is what has happened. If this had happened in 1830, the US government would have happily destroyed as many Muslims as it took--making little distinction between them--as would Spain and Russia and other nations that have had these cassus belli acts on their soil--as necessary to stop the behavior.

But it's not 1830 and the First Amendment and its lore of interpretation has become a sacred text, blasphemy or heresy against which would invite a vast convulsion of public outrage. The lore of interpretation makes no provision for us being the target of someone else's Holy War. It's religiously Unthinkable for Americans. Changing or amending the text would be blackest Heresy, with the traditional reactions of the faithful against heresy.

So enough of the public to prosecute the war privately acknowledges the lack, and calls it the "War on Terror" instead of the Defensive War Against Wahhabist Jihad--which is what it really is.

It's also gone out of fashion for Congress to declare war. I'm not sure they ever will again. Instead they simply "authorize military force." It's the modern euphemism Congress uses when it declares war so it can pretend it isn't, while still doing it. Nothing in the Constitution actually says that Congress can't use a euphemism in its phraseology when it declares war, so as far as I can tell it's Constitutional, even though I think it's nuts.

So what we have De Facto is a Congressional Declaration of War against someone else's Holy War on us. And it's being waged as such.

If the Democrats weren't hostages to every special interest in the country, including the pacifists, we wouldn't be having to use euphemisms to wage war when someone declares it on us.If the American Public didn't prefer euphemisms to amending the Constitution to explicitly allow Congress to declare war on any religion, cult, or sect of a religion or cult that commits acts of war against the United States, the war would be explicitly defined, with its terms of victory far more amenable to public debate.

You're arguing with the wrong people.

We have to fight this war--arguing that we don't would be idiotic.

If you're concerned about the repercussions of euphemisms for declarations of war, and euphemisms for defending our country against Holy War declared and waged against us, then you're arguing with the wrong people. You need to be arguing against the people who are so pacifistic and immersed in denial of reality that they make the euphemisms politically necessary as the only political compromise that allows us to defend ourselves.

*I* am concerned about the euphemisms. But the only cure for the euphemisms and the ill-defined nature of the war that protects the United States from a slippery slope abuse of these euphemisms, while still allowing us to effectively defend ourselves, is to convince a supermajority of your fellow citizens to amend the Constitution to explicitly empower Congress to declare war against a religion or sect whose adherents attack and wage Holy War on the United States. If you get that supermajority, an explicit declaration of war by a simple majority of Congress will be easy.

Yes, amending the Constitution and explicitly declaring war is the right thing to do.

But failing that, I thank every higher power there is that enough of our countrymen are willing to tolerate the euphemisms to allow us to wage this war, even though the euphemisms force us to wage it with one hand tied behind our national back.

All I can say is, talk to the pacifists.

With very few exceptions, they aren't here in the Tavern (http://bar.baen.com:8080/login; see "Ringo's Tavern". ed.).

So while you have a point, you don't have one *here*.

Julie


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On 6/28/2005 6:13:00 PM, Jonathan Briggs wrote:

I refuse to accept "The War on Terror" as anything more exciting than "The War on Drugs" or "The War on Poverty". Everyone should ignore it, it's far too vague. If I have to come up with cites, how about citing the appropriate Act of War passed by Congress creating "The War on Terror"? Well, here, just to make it easy on you: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:S.J.RES.23.ENR:

But that's not a declaration>of war.

Stephen didn't cite any examples for his statement, but I have to? Go read about the British citizens released from Gitmo and where they were captured. One in Pakistan and one in Zambia. I can't prove anything about the rest of the prisoners, but having 2 out of that small a sample is quite suggestive. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3089395.stm

[snip]

roundup

A roundup of vital posts from the several Brethren of the Vast.

New Sisyphus' "The President's Case and 9.11" makes a very nice addendum to President Bush's speech at Ft. Bragg, NC, that puts the Iraq campaigns nicely into context regarding the GWOT/WW4/Civilization-Islamofaschist War.
http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/2005/06/presidents-case-and-911.html

Belgravia Dispatch' excerpts and comments on "Ex-Reagan aide and CIA hand Herbert Meyer (Hat Tip: RCP):" 's "An Open Letter to POTUS."
http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004653.html

NRO - A Man’s Job, Ground combat is more than just a 'women’s issue.'

http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200505120814.asp

National Review Online
May 12, 2005

A Man’s Job
Ground combat is more than just a 'women’s issue.'

By Mackubin Thomas Owens, NRO Contributing Editor

On May 11, the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the House Armed Services Committee approved legislation requiring the Army to prohibit women from serving in any company-size unit that provides support to combat battalions or their subordinate companies. This is in no way revolutionary. In fact, as I wrote in National Review in December 2004, the House panel is merely telling the Army to abide by existing regulations.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. military opened a number of specialties to women. Changes in regulations permitted women to serve on the Navy’s combatant ships and fly Navy and Air Force combat aircraft. Ground combat, however, was still closed to them.

One of the reasons for these changes was the widespread acceptance of the view that technological advances had created a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA). Many of the more vociferous RMA promoters argued that emerging technologies had so completely changed the nature of war as to render the old verities that underpinned the traditional military ethos no longer true. RMA advocates contended that these emerging technologies and “information dominance” would eliminate “friction” and the “fog of war,” providing the commander and his subordinates nearly perfect “situational awareness,” thereby promising the capacity to use military force without the same risks as before. If this was the case, why did we need these old restrictions that merely hampered the progress of women? As former congresswoman Pat Schroeder famously remarked, a woman can push a button just as easily as a man.

Regrettably, it can take teams of men (and women) working long hours together under harsh and dangerous conditions to get the weapons platform or combat vehicle containing said "button" to where it needs to be.

Nonetheless, restrictions remained on women when it came to ground combat. On January 13, 1994, then-secretary of defense Les Aspin issued regulations prohibiting the assignment of women to units that engage in direct ground combat, e.g., infantry and armor. In his memo to the Services, Aspin said that “women should be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground,” defined as “engaging an enemy on the ground with individual or crew-served weapons, while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile force’s personnel.” This prohibition extended to the support units that were collocated with direct ground combat forces as well.

These regulations are still in effect. But the U.S. Army has violated these regulations without the notification required by current law, which requires the secretary of defense to provide formal advance notice to Congress of policy changes regarding female soldiers, accompanied by an analysis of proposed revisions on women’s exemption from Selective Service obligations.

This is another form of "back door" legislating, which, as a department of the executive branch of government, the Departments of Defense and the Army are ill-equipped, in a constitutional sense, to be undertaking.

In an attempt to make its units more “expeditionary,” the Army has developed a new concept that permits the deployment and employment of self-contained formations tasked organized for specific combat tasks. The 3rd Infantry Division, which recently redeployed to Iraq is the first Army unit to deploy to a combat zone under the new organizational concept.

The Army originally envisioned support troops as part of a self-contained “unit of action.” But if a forward-support company (FSC) is part of a combat unit, current DoD policy says that it cannot include women. Claiming that there are not enough male soldiers to fill its FSCs, the Army moved the FSCs from the maneuver battalions into the “gender”-integrated brigade support battalions (BSBs). Of course no matter where the FSCs appear on a table of organization, the fact is that in order to be effective, the soldiers of an FSC would have to live and work with the maneuver battalions all of the time.

If there aren't enough men to fill the Army's FSCs, perhaps the Army is recruiting too many women into these MOSs?

As Elaine Donnelly has pointed out, the Army has apparently rewritten the regulations regarding women in such a way as to make Bill Clinton’s infamous statement that “it depends on what the meaning of is, is,” appear to be straightforward. In her May 8 NRO piece describing a presentation by Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker at the American Enterprise Institute, she writes:

Current directives exempt female soldiers from direct ground-combat units such as the infantry and armor, and from smaller support companies that “collocate” (operate 100 percent of the time) with land-combat troops. The new, unauthorized wording narrows the “collocation rule” to apply only when a combat unit is actually “conducting an assigned direct ground combat mission.” (Emphasis added.)

The problem here is that sometimes the ground combat mission comes to you, as the Army is re-learning.

General Schoomaker recited Defense Department regulations, but claimed (without justification) that the Army has separate rules that exempt female soldiers from collocation with land-combat battalions “at the time that those units are undergoing those operations” (emphasis added). By adding the words “conducting” or “undergoing” (a direct ground-combat mission) to the collocation rule, the Army has created a new regulation that has not been authorized by the secretary of defense, or reported to Congress in advance, as required by law.

Oops.

In other words, the Army says it is not in violation of DoD regulations because women in FSCs are not really “collocated” until the combat unit is engaged or about to be engaged in a direct combat mission. The breathtaking assumption here is that women in these units can be pulled out before the battle starts.

Yeah. Right. This sort of assumption about evacuating female military personnel has a long and equally disappointing history. It ain't gonna happen. When the time comes to evacuate anyone, it'll be non-combatant civilians, not women in uniform. Women in uniform will be expected to do their duty. And I, for one, fully expect them to do it and do it well.

General Schoomaker is a very experienced and able soldier. He certainly understands the role of “friction” and the “fog of uncertainty” in battle, having experienced these phenomena first hand. He must know that trying to pull women out of their units under such circumstances, even if it could be done at all in the chaos and confusion of combat, would be incredibly disruptive, undermining unit cohesion and effectiveness and diverting resources needed to prevail in the battle.

Over the years, I have argued against the idea of placing American women in combat or in combat support or service support associated with direct ground combat. I base my position on the fact there are substantial physical differences between men and women that place the latter at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to ground combat. In addition, men treat women differently than they treat other men. This can undermine the comradeship upon which the unit cohesion necessary to success on the battlefield depends. The presence of women also leads to double standards that have a serious impact on morale and performance. In other words, men and women are not interchangeable. As I wrote in January, even the Israelis, who draft women into the IDF, do not place them in ground combat units.

But does the Israeli Army have a vast cohort of women service academy graduates who, since 1975, have been percolating upwards through the ranks, only to be stymied by what amounts to a glass ceiling: the highest jobs and ranks go to officers who have commanded units (battalions, regiments, brigades and divisions) in combat. Division commands go to combat arms officers. Combat arms officers are men. Ergo, no women can qualify, realistically, for the top jobs, such as one of the geographical commands such as USAREUR, EUCOM, PACOM, or CENTCOM.

As persuasive as I believe my arguments are, the decision to place women in units that expose them to direct ground combat does not depend on my opinion. But it does not depend exclusively on the Army either. If the president and the secretary of defense believe the regulations should be changed to reflect the Army’s new approach, the latter needs to advise Congress, as current law requires. As Donnelly observes, this is a national-security matter, not a less important “women’s issue.” As such, Congress needs a say in this matter.

Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.

AM - How We Would Fight China

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200506/kaplan

Atlantic Monthly
June 2005 Pg. 49

How We Would Fight China
The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was

By Robert D. Kaplan

For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base—stretching far back into Central Asia—from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific.
In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium.

To the list of disparate places, I would add Central & South America, as well as the Caribbean.

How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.

The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization's end effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by U.S. soldiers and Marines—a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces in Georgia—the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.

I would soften this harsh appraisal of NATO. Even if true, legacy effects of NATO interoperability are part of what enables our Coalition of the Willing to function in a combat environment. The Polish-led Multinational Division Central-South (MND-CS) ran on time-tested NATO principles of interoperability. Our latest-joining new NATO partner-countries were there in force, as well as some not-so-NATO country's military contingents. And where they were unfamiliar with NATO-style operating procedures and protocols, they were eager to learn.

The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy, PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not: that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict—an epoch that will start to wind down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush administration.
The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific—and indeed the re-emergence of NATO as an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America's unswerving aim. In its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol seas more distant than the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. That is why NATO's current commander, Marine General James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO's future lies in amphibious, expeditionary warfare.

Let me describe our military organization in the Pacific—an area through which I have traveled extensively during the past three years. PACOM has always been the largest, most venerable, and most interesting of the U.S. military's area commands. (Its roots go back to the U.S. Pacific Army of the Philippines War, 1899-1902.) Its domain stretches from East Africa to beyond the International Date Line and includes the entire Pacific Rim, encompassing half the world's surface and more than half of its economy. The world's six largest militaries, two of which (America's and China's) are the most rapidly modernizing, all operate within PACOM's sphere of control. PACOM has—in addition to its many warships and submarines—far more dedicated troops than CENTCOM. Even though the military's area commands do not own troops today in the way they used to, these statistics matter, because they demonstrate that the United States has chosen to locate the bulk of its forces in the Pacific, not in the Middle East. CENTCOM fights wars with troops essentially borrowed from PACOM.

Quietly in recent years, by negotiating bilateral security agreements with countries that have few such arrangements with one another, the U.S. military has formed a Pacific military alliance of sorts at PACOM headquarters, in Honolulu. This is where the truly interesting meetings are being held today, rather than in Ditchley or Davos. The attendees at those meetings, who often travel on PACOM's dime, are military officers from such places as Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.

Otto von Bismarck, the father of the Second Reich in continental Europe, would recognize the emerging Pacific system. In 2002 the German commentator Josef Joffe appreciated this in a remarkably perceptive article in The National Interest, in which he argued that in terms of political alliances, the United States has come to resemble Bismarck's Prussia. Britain, Russia, and Austria needed Prussia more than they needed one another, Joffe wrote, thus making them "spokes" to Berlin's "hub"; the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan exposed a world in which America can forge different coalitions for different crises. The world's other powers, he said, now need the United States more than they need one another.

Remind me: who was it that caught so much ridicule for terming the United States "the indispensable nation?"

Unfortunately, the United States did not immediately capitalize on this new power arrangement, because President George W. Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of Bismarck, who understood that such a system could endure only so long as one didn't overwhelm it. The Bush administration did just that, of course, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which led France, Germany, Russia, and China, along with a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, to unite against us.

I would parse that last sentence a bit differently, stating that "France, Germany, Russian and China led a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico and Chile, to unit against us."

In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck's imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.

Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to accommodate China's inevitable re-emergence as a great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive—and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and nuclear-powered submarines—a clear signal that they intend not only to protect their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into the Pacific and beyond.

This is wholly legitimate. China's rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people—and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War—style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will occur mostly within PACOM's area of responsibility.

To do their job well, military officers must approach power in the most cautious, mechanical, and utilitarian way possible, assessing and reassessing regional balances of power while leaving the values side of the political equation to the civilian leadership. This makes military officers, of all government professionals, the least prone to be led astray by the raptures of liberal internationalism and neo-conservative interventionism.

The history of World War II shows the importance of this approach. In the 1930s the U.S. military, nervous about the growing strength of Germany and Japan, rightly lobbied for building up our forces. But by 1940 and 1941 the military (not unlike the German general staff a few years earlier) was presciently warning of the dangers of a two-front war; and by late summer of 1944 it should have been thinking less about defeating Germany and more about containing the Soviet Union. Today Air Force and Navy officers worry about a Taiwanese declaration of independence, because such a move would lead the United States into fighting a war with China that might not be in our national interest. Indonesia is another example: whatever the human-rights failures of the Indonesian military, PACOM assumes, correctly, that a policy of non-engagement would only open the door to Chinese-Indonesian military cooperation in a region that represents the future of world terrorism. (The U.S. military's response to the Asian tsunami was, of course, a humanitarian effort; but PACOM strategists had to have recognized that a vigorous response would gain political support for the military-basing rights that will form part of our deterrence strategy against China.) Or consider Korea: some Pacific-based officers take a reunified Korean peninsula for granted, and their main concern is whether the country will be "Finlandized" by China or will be secure within an American-Japanese sphere of influence.

Fighting a war with China would clearly not be in our national interest. Unless of course, the alternatives are worse, such as losing a war with China by not fighting.

PACOM's immersion in Asian power dynamics gives it unusual diplomatic weight, and consequently more leverage in Washington. And PACOM will not be nearly as constrained as CENTCOM by Washington-based domestic politics. Our actions in the Pacific will not be swayed by the equivalent of the Israel lobby; Protestant evangelicals will care less about the Pacific Rim than about the fate of the Holy Land. And because of the vast economic consequences of misjudging the power balance in East Asia, American business and military interests are likely to run in tandem toward a classically conservative policy of deterring China without needlessly provoking it, thereby amplifying PACOM's authority. Our stance toward China and the Pacific, in other words, comes with a built-in stability—and this, in turn, underscores the notion of a new Cold War that is sustainable over the very long haul.
Moreover, the complexity of the many political and military relationships managed by PACOM will give the command considerably greater influence than that currently exercised by CENTCOM—which, as a few military experts have disparagingly put it to me, deals only with a bunch of "third-rate Middle Eastern armies."

The relative shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific in coming years—idealistic rhetoric notwithstanding—will force the next American president, no matter what his or her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to those of moderate Republican presidents such as George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The management of risk will become a governing ideology. Even if Iraq turns out to be a democratic success story, it will surely be a from-the-jaws-of-failure success that no one in the military or the diplomatic establishment will ever want to repeat—especially in Asia, where the economic repercussions of a messy military adventure would be enormous. "Getting into a war with China is easy," says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who developed the weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s as a CIA officer and is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington. "You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan—especially as the Chinese develop a submarine and missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the dilemma is, How do you end a war with China?"

A war with China would pretty-much end only when the Chinese said it was over. The best scenario to hope for would be some form of internally-directed regime change that would lead to a cessation of hostilities. Unless you're willing to get into some really messy strategies; winning against China would be almost as bad as fighting. It would be like Iraq cubed over and over again. It's like the famous dog chasing a car: what in the world would he do with it if he caught it?

Like the nations involved in World War I, and unlike the rogue states everyone has been concentrating on, the United States and China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity to keep fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile exchange. This has far-reaching implications. "Ending a war with China," Vickers says, "may mean effecting some form of regime change, because we don't want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place." Another analyst, this one inside the Pentagon, told me, "Ending a war with China will force us to substantially reduce their military capacity, thus threatening their energy sources and the Communist Party's grip on power. The world will not be the same afterward. It's a very dangerous road to travel on."

Oops. I can see that the author is smarter than me, although I already suspected that.

The better road is for PACOM to deter China in Bismarckian fashion, from a geographic hub of comparative isolation—the Hawaiian Islands—with spokes reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and India. These countries, in turn, would form secondary hubs to help us manage the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian archipelagoes, among other places, and also the Indian Ocean.
The point of this arrangement would be to dissuade China so subtly that over time the rising behemoth would be drawn into the PACOM alliance system without any large-scale conflagration—the way NATO was ultimately able to neutralize the Soviet Union.

Whatever we say or do, China will spend more and more money on its military in the coming decades. Our only realistic goal may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive, not offensive, in nature. Our efforts will require particular care, because China, unlike the Soviet Union of old (or Russia today, for that matter), boasts soft as well as hard power. Businesspeople love the idea of China; you don't have to beg them to invest there, as you do in Africa and so many other places. China's mixture of traditional authoritarianism and market economics has broad cultural appeal throughout Asia and other parts of the world.
And because China is improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of its citizens, the plight of its dissidents does not have quite the same market allure as did the plight of the Soviet Union's Sakharovs and Sharanskys. Democracy is attractive in places where tyranny has been obvious, odious, and unsuccessful, of course, as in Ukraine and Zimbabwe. But the world is full of gray areas—Jordan and Malaysia, for example—where elements of tyranny have ensured stability and growth.

Consider Singapore. Its mixture of democracy and authoritarianism has made it unpopular with idealists in Washington, but as far as PACOM is concerned, the country is, despite its small size, one of the most popular and helpful in the Pacific. Its ethnically blind military meritocracy, its nurturing concern for the welfare of officers and enlisted men alike, and its jungle-warfare school in Brunei are second to none. With the exception of Japan, far to the north, Singapore offers the only non-American base in the Pacific where our nuclear carriers can be serviced. Its help in hunting down Islamic terrorists in the Indonesian archipelago has been equal or superior to the help offered elsewhere by our most dependable Western allies. One Washington-based military futurist told me, "The Sings, well—they're just awesome in every way."

PACOM's objective, in the words of a Pacific-based Marine general, must be "military multilateralism on steroids." This is not just a question of our future training with the "Sings" in Brunei, of flying test sorties with the Indian air force, of conducting major annual exercises in Thailand, or of utilizing a soon-to-open training facility in northern Australia with the approval of our alliance partners. It's also a matter of forging interoperability with friendly Asian militaries at the platoon level, by constantly moving U.S. troops from one training deployment to another.

Forging interoperability pays off in spades. In addition to the personal relationships, the simple working familiarity makes "us and them" into simply "us," a factor which cannot be quantified in terms of its effectiveness as a combat multiplier.

This would be an improvement over NATO, whose fighting fitness has been hampered by the addition of substandard former-Eastern-bloc militaries. Politics, too, favors a tilt toward the Pacific: tensions between the United States and Europe currently impede military integration, whereas our Pacific allies, notably Japan and Australia, want more military engagement with the United States, to counter the rise of the Chinese navy. This would work to our benefit. The Japanese military, although small, possesses elite niche capabilities, in special-forces and diesel-submarine warfare. And the aggressive frontier style of the Australians makes them cognitively closer to Americans than even the British.

Military multilateralism in the Pacific will nevertheless be constrained by the technical superiority of U.S. forces; it will be difficult to develop bilateral training missions with Asian militaries that are not making the same investments in high-tech equipment that we are. A classic military lesson is that technological superiority does not always confer the advantages one expects. Getting militarily so far ahead of everyone else in the world creates a particular kind of loneliness that not even the best diplomats can always alleviate, because diplomacy itself is worthless if it's not rooted in realistic assessments of comparative power.

At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy's warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world's warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy's warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world's thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn't mount a rescue effort after the tsunami). The statistics go on. But as Robert Work, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, points out, at the start of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War, Athens had a great advantage over Sparta, which had no navy—but Sparta eventually emerged the victor.

China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, in late June of 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Surigao Strait, in October of 1944, were the last great sea battles in American history, and are very likely to remain so. Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically, as terrorists do. In Iraq the insurgents have shown us the low end of asymmetry, with car bombs. But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art.
That is the threat.

There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection—that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers.

With an advanced missile program the Chinese could fire hundreds of missiles at Taiwan before we could get to the island to defend it. Such a capability, combined with a new fleet of submarines (soon to be a greater undersea force than ours, in size if not in quality), might well be enough for the Chinese to coerce other countries into denying port access to U.S. ships.

Most of China's seventy current submarines are past-their-prime diesels of Russian design; but these vessels could be used to create mobile minefields in the South China, East China, and Yellow Seas, where, as the Wall Street Journal reporter David Lague has written, "uneven depths, high levels of background noise, strong currents and shifting thermal layers" would make detecting the submarines very difficult. Add to this the seventeen new stealthy diesel submarines and three nuclear ones that the Chinese navy will deploy by the end of the decade, and one can imagine that China could launch an embarrassing strike against us, or against one of our Asian allies. Then there is the whole field of ambiguous coercion—for example, a series of non-attributable cyberattacks on Taiwan's electrical-power grids, designed to gradually demoralize the population. This isn't science fiction; the Chinese have invested significantly in cyberwarfare training and technology. Just because the Chinese are not themselves democratic doesn't mean they are not expert in manipulating the psychology of a democratic electorate.

What we can probably expect from China in the near future is specific demonstrations of strength—like its successful forcing down of a U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance plane in the spring of 2001. Such tactics may represent the trend of twenty-first-century warfare better than anything now happening in Iraq—and China will have no shortage of opportunities in this arena. During one of our biennial Rim of the Pacific naval exercises the Chinese could sneak a sub under a carrier battle group and then surface it. They could deploy a moving target at sea and then hit it with a submarine- or land-based missile, demonstrating their ability to threaten not only carriers but also destroyers, frigates, and cruisers. (Think about the political effects of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, off the coast of Yemen in 2000—and then think about a future in which hitting such ships will be easier.) They could also bump up against one of our ships during one of our ongoing Freedom of Navigation exercises off the Asian coast. The bumping of a ship may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind that in a global media age such an act can have important strategic consequences. Because the world media tend to side with a spoiler rather than with a reigning superpower, the Chinese would have a built-in political advantage.

What should be our military response to such developments? We need to go more unconventional. Our present Navy is mainly a "blue-water" force, responsible for the peacetime management of vast oceanic spaces—no small feat, and one that enables much of the world's free trade. The phenomenon of globalization could not occur without American ships and sailors. But increasingly what we will need is, in essence, three separate navies: one designed to maintain our ability to use the sea as a platform for offshore bombing (to support operations like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan); one designed for littoral Special Operations combat (against terrorist groups based in and around Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, for example); and one designed to enhance our stealth capabilities (for patrolling the Chinese mainland and the Taiwan Strait, among other regions). All three of these navies will have a role in deflecting China, directly and indirectly, given the variety of dysfunctional Pacific Island republics that are strengthening their ties with Beijing.

Our aircraft carriers already provide what we need for that first navy; we must further develop the other two. The Special Operations navy will require lots of small vessels, among them the littoral-combat ship being developed by General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin.
Approximately 400 feet long, the LCS requires only a small crew, can operate in very shallow water, can travel very fast (up to forty knots), and will deploy Special Operations Forces (namely, Navy SEALs). Another critical part of the littoral navy will be the Mark V special-operations craft. Only eighty feet long, the Mark V can travel at up to fifty knots and has a range of 600 nautical miles. With a draft of only five feet, it can deliver a SEAL platoon directly onto a beach—and at some $5 million apiece, the Pentagon can buy dozens for the price of just one F/A-22 fighter jet.

Developing the third type of navy will require real changes. Particularly as the media become more intrusive, we must acquire more stealth, so that, for example, we can send commandos ashore from a submarine to snatch or kill terrorists, or leave special operators behind to carry out missions in an area over which no government has control. Submarines have disadvantages, of course: they offer less of a bombing platform than aircraft carriers, and pound for pound are more costly. Nevertheless, they are the wave of the future, in no small measure because protecting aircraft carriers from missile attack may slowly become a pursuit of diminishing returns for us.

Our stealth navy would be best served by the addition of new diesel submarines of the sort that Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Sweden already have in the water or under development—and which China will soon have too. But because of our global policing responsibilities, which will necessarily keep us in the nuclear-sub business, we're unlikely to switch to diesel submarines. Instead we will adapt what we've got. Already we are refitting four Trident subs with conventional weapons, and making them able to support the deployment of SEAL teams and eventually, perhaps, long-range unmanned spy aircraft. The refitted Tridents can act as big mother ships for smaller assets deployed closer to the littorals.
None of this will change our need for basing rights in the Pacific, of course. The more access to bases we have, the more flexibility we'll have—to support unmanned flights, to allow aerial refueling, and perhaps most important, to force the Chinese military to concentrate on a host of problems rather than just a few. Never provide your adversary with only a few problems to solve (finding and hitting a carrier, for example), because if you do, he'll solve them.

Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam's northern tip, rep- resents the future of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen's 10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force's arsenal, and could accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force's biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.
Guam, which is also home to a submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division can cover almost all of PACOM's area of responsibility. Flying to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours; from Guam it takes four.

"This is not like Okinawa," Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at the time of my visit, told me. "This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory." The United States can do anything it wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed, what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China, has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we would force the Chinese either to attack it in port—thereby launching an assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in the eyes of the world—or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later.

During the Cold War the Navy had a specific infrastructure for a specific threat: war with the Soviet Union. But now the threat is multiple and uncertain: we need to be prepared at any time to fight, say, a conventional war against North Korea or an unconventional counterinsurgency battle against a Chinese-backed rogue island-state. This requires a more agile Navy presence on the island, which in turn means outsourcing services to the civilian community on Guam so that the Navy can concentrate on military matters. One Navy captain I met with had grown up all over the Pacific Rim. He told me of the Navy's plans to expand the waterfront, build more bachelors' quarters, and harden the electrical-power system by putting it underground. "The fact that we have lots of space today is meaningless," he said. "The question is, How would we handle the surge requirement necessitated by a full-scale war?"

There could be a problem with all of this. By making Guam a Hawaii of the western Pacific, we make life simple for the Chinese, because we give them just one problem to solve: how to threaten or intimidate Guam. The way to counter them will be not by concentration but by dispersion. So how will we prevent Guam from becoming too big?

In a number of ways. We may build up Palau, an archipelago of 20,000 inhabitants between Mindanao, in the Philippines, and the Federated States of Micronesia, whose financial aid is contingent on a defense agreement with us. We will keep up our bases in Central Asia, close to western China—among them Karshi-Khanabad, in Uzbekistan, and Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, which were developed and expanded for the invasion of Afghanistan. And we will establish what are known as cooperative security locations.

A cooperative security location can be a tucked-away corner of a host country's civilian airport, or a dirt runway somewhere with fuel and mechanical help nearby, or a military airport in a friendly country with which we have no formal basing agreement but, rather, an informal arrangement with private contractors acting as go-betweens. Because the CSL concept is built on subtle relationships, it's where the war-fighting ability of the Pentagon and the diplomacy of the State Department coincide—or should. The problem with big bases in, say, Turkey—as we learned on the eve of the invasion of Iraq—is that they are an intrusive, intimidating symbol of American power, and the only power left to a host country is the power to deny us use of such bases. In the future, therefore, we will want unobtrusive bases that benefit the host country much more obviously than they benefit us. Allowing us the use of such a base would ramp up power for a country rather than humiliating it.

I have visited a number of CSLs in East Africa and Asia. Here is how they work. The United States provides aid to upgrade maintenance facilities, thereby helping the host country to better project its own air and naval power in the region. At the same time, we hold periodic exercises with the host country's military, in which the base is a focus. We also offer humanitarian help to the surrounding area. Such civil-affairs projects garner positive publicity for our military in the local media—and they long preceded the response to the tsunami, which marked the first time that many in the world media paid attention to the humanitarian work done all over the world, all the time, by the U.S. military. The result is a positive diplomatic context for getting the host country's approval for use of the base when and if we need it.

Often the key role in managing a CSL is played by a private contractor. In Asia, for example, the private contractor is usually a retired American noncom, either Navy or Air Force, quite likely a maintenance expert, who is living in, say, Thailand or the Philippines, speaks the language fluently, perhaps has married locally after a divorce back home, and is generally much liked by the locals. He rents his facilities at the base from the host-country military, and then charges a fee to the U.S. Air Force pilots transiting the base. Officially he is in business for himself, which the host country likes because it can then claim it is not really working with the American military. Of course no one, including the local media, believes this. But the very fact that a relationship with the U.S. armed forces is indirect rather than direct eases tensions. The private contractor also prevents unfortunate incidents by keeping the visiting pilots out of trouble—steering them to the right hotels and bars, and advising them on how to behave. (Without Dan Generette, a private contractor for years at Utapao Naval Station, in Thailand, that base could never have been ramped up to provide tsunami relief the way it was.)

Visiting with these contractors and being taken around foreign military airfields by them, I saw how little, potentially, the Air Force would need on the ground in order to land planes and take off. Especially since 9/11 the Air Force has been slowly developing an austere, expeditionary mentality to amend its lifestyle, which has historically been cushy in comparison with that of the other branches of the armed forces. Servicing a plane often takes less on the ground than servicing a big ship, and the Air Force is beginning to grasp the concept of light and lethal, and of stealthy, informal relationships. To succeed in the Pacific and elsewhere, the Navy will need to further develop a similar outlook—thinking less in terms of obvious port visits and more in terms of slipping in and out in the middle of the night.

The first part of the twenty-first century will be not nearly as stable as the second half of the twentieth, because the world will be not nearly as bipolar as it was during the Cold War. The fight between Beijing and Washington over the Pacific will not dominate all of world politics, but it will be the most important of several regional struggles. Yet it will be the organizing focus for the U.S. defense posture abroad. If we are smart, this should lead us back into concert with Europe. No matter how successfully our military adapts to the rise of China, it is clear that our current dominance in the Pacific will not last. The Asia expert Mark Helprin has argued that while we pursue our democratization efforts in the Middle East, increasingly befriending only those states whose internal systems resemble our own, China is poised to reap the substantial benefits of pursuing its interests amorally—what the United States did during the Cold War. The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese influence.

We also need to realize that in the coming years and decades the moral distance between Europe and China is going to contract considerably, especially if China's authoritarianism becomes increasingly restrained, and the ever expanding European Union becomes a less-than-democratic superstate run in imperious regulatory style by Brussels-based functionaries. Russia, too, is headed in a decidedly undemocratic direction: Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, reacted to our support of democracy in Ukraine by agreeing to "massive" joint air and naval exercises with the Chinese, scheduled for the second half of this year. These unprecedented joint Russian-Chinese exercises will be held on Chinese territory.

Therefore the idea that we will no longer engage in the "cynical" game of power politics is illusory, as is the idea that we will be able to advance a foreign policy based solely on Wilsonian ideals. We will have to continually play various parts of the world off China, just as Richard Nixon played less than morally perfect states off the Soviet Union. This may well lead to a fundamentally new NATO alliance, which could become a global armada that roams the Seven Seas. Indeed, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Germans, and the Spanish are making significant investments in fast missile-bearing ships and in landing-platform docks for beach assaults, and the British and the French are investing in new aircraft carriers. Since Europe increasingly seeks to avoid conflict and to reduce geopolitics to a series of negotiations and regulatory disputes, an emphasis on sea power would suit it well. Sea power is intrinsically less threatening than land power. It allows for a big operation without a large onshore footprint. Consider the tsunami effort, during which Marines and sailors returned to their carrier and destroyers each night. Armies invade; navies make port visits. Sea power has always been a more useful means of realpolitik than land power. It allows for a substantial military presence in areas geographically remote from states themselves—but without an overtly belligerent effect. Because ships take so long to get somewhere, and are less threatening than troops on the ground, naval forces allow diplomats to ratchet up pressure during a crisis in a responsible—and reversible—way. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962.
As the British expert H. P. Willmott has written, "The use of naval power by the Americans was the least dangerous option that presented itself, and the slowness with which events unfolded at sea gave time for both sides to conceive and implement a rational response to a highly dangerous situation."

Submarines have been an exception to this rule, but their very ability to operate both literally and figuratively below the surface, completely off the media radar screen, allows a government to be militarily aggressive, particularly in the field of espionage, without offending the sensibilities of its citizenry. Sweden's neutrality is a hard-won luxury built on naval strength that many of its idealistic citizens may be incompletely aware of. Pacifistic Japan, the ultimate trading nation, is increasingly dependent on its burgeoning submarine force. Sea power protects trade, which is regulated by treaties; it's no accident that the father of international law, Hugo Grotius, was a seventeenth-century Dutchman who lived at the height of Dutch naval power worldwide. Because of globalization, the twenty-first century will see unprecedented sea traffic, requiring unprecedented regulation by diplomats and naval officers alike. And as the economic influence of the European Union expands around the globe, Europe may find, like the United States in the nineteenth century and China today, that it has to go to sea to protect its interests.

The ships and other naval equipment being built now by the Europeans are designed to slot into U.S. battle networks. And European nations, which today we conceive of as Atlantic forces, may develop global naval functions; already, for example, Swedish submarine units are helping to train Americans in the Pacific on how to hunt for diesel subs. The sea may be nato's and Europe's best chance for a real military future. And yet the alliance is literally and symbolically weak. For it to regain its political significance, NATO must become a military alliance that no one doubts is willing to fight and kill at a moment's notice. That was its reputation during the Cold War—and it was so well regarded by the Soviets that they never tested it. Expanding NATO eastward has helped stabilize former Warsaw Pact states, of course, but admitting substandard militaries to the alliance's ranks, although politically necessary, has been problematic. The more NATO expands eastward, the more superficial and unwieldy it becomes as a fighting force, and the more questionable becomes its claim that it will fight in defense of any member state. Taking in yet more substandard militaries like Ukraine's and Georgia's too soon is simply not in NATO's interest. We can't just declare an expansion of a defense alliance because of demonstrations somewhere in support of democracy. Rather, we must operate in the way we are now operating in Georgia, where we have sent in the Marines for a year to train the Georgian armed forces. That way, when a country like Georgia does make it into NATO, its membership will have military as well as political meaning. Only by making it an agile force that is ready to land on, say, West African beaches at a few days' or hours' notice can we save NATO.

And we need to save it. NATO is ours to lead—unlike the increasingly powerful European Union, whose own defense force, should it become a reality, would inevitably emerge as a competing regional power, one that might align itself with China in order to balance against us. Let me be even clearer about something that policymakers and experts often don't want to be clear about. nato and an autonomous European defense force cannot both prosper. Only one can—and we should want it to be the former, so that Europe is a military asset for us, not a liability, as we confront China.

The Chinese military challenge is already a reality to officers and sailors of the U.S. Navy. I recently spent four weeks embedded on a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Benfold, roaming around the Pacific from Indonesia to Singapore, the Philippines, Guam, and then Hawaii.

During my visit the Benfold completed a tsunami-relief mission (which consisted of bringing foodstuffs ashore and remapping the coastline) and then recommenced combat drills, run from the ship's combat-information center—a dark and cavernous clutter of computer consoles. Here a tactical action officer led the response to what were often hypothetical feints or attacks from China or North Korea.

Observing the action in the combat-information center, I learned that although naval warfare is conducted with headphones and computer keyboards, the stress level is every bit as acute as in gritty urban combat. A wrong decision can result in a catastrophic missile strike, against which no degree of physical toughness or bravery is a defense.

Sea warfare is cerebral. The threat is over the horizon; nothing can be seen; and everything is reduced to mathematics. The object is deception more than it is aggression—getting the other side to shoot first, so as to gain the political advantage, yet not having to absorb the damage of the attack.

As enthusiastic as the crew members of the Benfold were in helping the victims of the tsunami, once they left Indonesian waters they were just as enthusiastic about honing their surface and subsurface warfare skills. I even picked up a feeling, especially among the senior chief petty officers (the iron grunts of the Navy, who provide the truth unvarnished), that they might be tested in the western Pacific to the same degree that the Marines have been in Iraq. The main threat in the Persian Gulf to date has been asymmetric attacks, like the bombing of the Cole. But the Pacific offers all kinds of threats, from increasingly aggressive terrorist groups in the Islamic archipelagoes of Southeast Asia to cat-and-mouse games with Chinese subs in the waters to the north. Preparing to meet all the possible threats the Pacific has to offer will force the Navy to become more nimble, and will make it better able to deal with unconventional emergencies, such as tsunamis, when they arise.

What about pirates? He didn't mention the threat of pirates?

Of course, the naval threat of pirates (to most naval establishments) is nil.

Welcome to the next few decades. As one senior chief put it to me, referring first to the Persian Gulf and then to the Pacific, "The Navy needs to spend less time in that salty little mud puddle and more time in the pond."

Robert D. Kaplan is an Atlantic correspondent and the author of Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, forthcoming in September from Random House—the first of several books he is writing about the armed forces.

NYT - Air Force Chaplain Says She Was Removed For Being Critical

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/15chaplain.html

New York Times
May 15, 2005

Air Force Chaplain Says She Was Removed For Being Critical

By Laurie Goodstein

A chaplain at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs who has accused her superiors of using their positions to promote evangelical Christianity among the cadets says she was fired from an administrative job because of her outspokenness and was given orders to ship out to Japan.

This sort of thing, sudden transfers, is hardly unprecedented as a modus operandi of military CYA exercises.

Also, for an interesting perspective on what it's like to be a female chaplain in today's Army, read "This Woman's Army."

An Air Force task force, meanwhile, has finished an investigation at the academy into charges by the chaplain and others that officers there were inappropriately proselytizing the cadets.
The academy chaplain, Capt. MeLinda Morton, said she had disagreed with her boss, the academy's chief chaplain, Col. Michael Whittington, after a critical report by a team from the Yale Divinity School was released to the news media in April. The report, dated July 2004 and which she helped write, found that some academy chaplains were insensitive to the religious diversity of the cadets.

Some of the more evangelical christian chaplains in the Army have a reputation for this sort of thing. The days when the Episcopalians and Catholics, along with Methodists and other mainstream denominations dominated the chaplain corps are long gone.

Captain Morton said her boss asked her to denounce the report and defend the academy, but she told him she agreed with it. She said that about two weeks later, on May 4, she received an e-mail message from Colonel Whittington dismissing her from her position as his administrative assistant, or "executive officer." However, she remains a chaplain, retains her rank and earns the same salary.

"That is pretty plainly, in my mind, retribution," Captain Morton said. "That makes a big point on a staff. The point is, 'We don't regard Mel as trustworthy, and we humiliate her by firing her.' However, in the whole scope of things, that's pretty minor to what's going on in the academy."

At least Chaplain Morton has things in perspective.

She also said that in March she received orders to transfer to Okinawa, and from there could be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Captain Morton said she was surprised because in December she was told by Colonel Whittington that she would be staying at the academy through summer 2006 to see several projects through. At the time, Captain Morton was developing a sensitivity training program for the academy and was involved in pastoral care for cadets who were victims in a sexual abuse scandal that swept the academy in 2003.
An academy spokesman, Lt. Col. Laurent Fox, said in an interview that Captain Morton's dismissal as executive officer and her reassignment to Okinawa were entirely routine, and not retribution. He said that Captain Morton was removed from her position in order to make way for a new executive officer because Colonel Whittington was leaving the academy in June and Captain Morton is leaving in July.

"We don't see this as a dismissal," Colonel Fox said. "This kind of a transition is a normal process that happens in squadrons across the Air Force."

Colonel Fox said he knew nothing about a meeting that led to a quarrel over the Yale Divinity School report. A request to interview Colonel Whittington was denied because he was being interviewed by the task force investigating the religious climate at the academy. The task force is expected to release a preliminary report on May 23.

Complaints about the religious climate at the academy first surfaced after fliers were passed out in the dining hall advertising a showing of the movie "The Passion of the Christ." An alumnus of the academy, Mikey Weinstein, grew concerned after he visited his son at the school last year and learned that he had been subject to repeated religious slurs because he is Jewish.

This sort of thing, religious slurs, has no place a one of our service academies.

Mr. Weinstein, who served in the Reagan administration, said yesterday that he became enraged and set out to see if others had similar experiences. He said he has now spoken with 117 academy cadets, staff members and faculty members who complained about religious intimidation and proselytizing at the academy. Of the 117 people, 8 are Jewish, one is an atheist, about 10 are Catholic and the rest are nonevangelical Protestants.

His son was interviewed by the task force this week, Mr. Weinstein said. He said he was not interviewed by the task force, even though "I have a boatload of information," he said.

"I can't reveal people's names, but I thought it might be useful," he said.

news from New Sisyphus

http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/2005/06/decision.html

Unfortunately, the New Sisyphus family will be leaving the serving ranks of the foreign service family. He will be missed.

re: The Golden Rules of Returning Home

http://thenationalguardexperience.blogspot.com/2005/06/golden-rules-of-returning-home.html

Hat tip to The National Guard Experience.

The Golden Rules of Returning Home

Re: The Golden Rules Series

After being deployed to Afghanistan for almost a year, I have laid out these rules of returning home for family, friends, soldiers, and wives. Now, listen up. The government is hard-pressed. It copes with millions of issues from returning soldiers and their families. I wanted to help and do my part. So, here are some guidelines to help cope with the 'real' issues. Anyone who doesn't read these rules, deserves to be a punching bag. Don't try to be a hotshot and think you know-it-all. Oh wait.. Anyway, once the welcome home festivities are over and the balloons are taken down, are when these rules take effect.

I. Wives, Listen up. Seriously, if I could only list one rule, this would technically be it. BE PREPARED. Uhh, intimately. If you know what I mean. Even if your husband's deployment was only three months to six months, be prepared. If his deployment was a year, God Help you.

II. Soldiers, don't try taking over family affairs right away or complaining about her new hairdo. This is a recipe for disaster. I mean, really, after your loved-one has been managing the bills, the house, the kids, the pets, yardwork, groceries, and so on, for a year - NOT wise. Trust me. If you choose to violate this rule by saying something like 'the new curtains don't match the sofa', Rule# 1 will no longer be in effect.

III. Soldiers, Once you return don't over overindulge, especially with alcohol. Remember highschool? When you got drunk for the first time and woke up in a woman's dress, smelling like rancid puke vomit, and you had strange marks all over your body and your car was missing? Then your so-called buddies posted pictures of you making out with your dog. It could happen again. According to the figures, experts say that your tolerance to alcholic beverages goes down exponentially each month. Be assured, you become a lightweight. Years of tolerance building have been lost. One Zima and you'll be acting like a fart-knocker. Plus, if you're not careful you'll end up blowing your tax free $25,000 you saved on deployment at the bar. Good news, overindulging doesn't apply to Rule# 1.

IV. Family, friends, never ask if we shot anyone. We're tired of hearing this question. What's wrong with you people? We're trying to get over the anxiety of a combat zone, near-beer, major depression, anti-malaria pills, constipation, post-traumatic stress disorder, MREs, and you've got the nerve to ask this. If you do, you should have the shitkicked out of you. Yes I own a pair of shitkickers, and yes I know how to use them. Now. Soldiers, if you wanna have fun with some civilian puke, scratch your head, twitch your dominant eye, say 'Not today', then skip to your closet while hollering 'wait right there, i'll be back.'

V. Soldiers, never tell bullshit war stories. Now, hear me out, Rambo. Let me break it down into easier to understand terms. If you see a girl at a bar and you're trying to get jiggy with it, don't drop some war story abot single-handedly killing 100 enemy with nothing but an e-tool. It's a bad pick up line. Instead, my favorite, ask her 'are your legs tired? because you've been running through my mind all night.' Worked for me...

VI. Wives, quit asking if we're ok. Our IQ might only be 2 points higher than a rock after spending a year in the desert, but if we don't remember how to operate a toilet, we'll figure it out. Eventually. And don't add insult to injury by talking to us in baby-talk: 'oh my little sugar muffin, did you forget how to flush the toilet.'

VII. Employers, have our jobs waiting for us Guardsmen and Reservists. The law says we can return to work as if we never left. That includes our vacation accrual. CHA-CHING!

VIII. Wives, share your soldier with family and friends. There is a tendency not to share. But trust me, if you're sick and tired of Rule #1, letting your soldier visit family and friends is about the only relief you're going to get.

IX. Family, friends, don't complain about simple things. Are you trippin'? All civilian pukes are guilty of it even when we call home. There are things they take for granted: 'dammit, they put ketchup on my cheeseburger' or 'for chrissakes i asked for no butter on my popcorn'. You're going to piss off a soldier that was gone for 12 months who just killed 100 enemy with only an e-tool. You'll get a can of whup ass opened up on you.

X. Wives, I know I'm repeating myself, damn skippy, but this is for your own good. Be prepared.

DFP - Commission Rightly Urges U.S. Not To Rush On Overseas Base Closings

http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/egalloway13e_20050513.htm

Detroit Free Press
May 13, 2005

Commission Rightly Urges U.S. Not To Rush On Overseas Base Closings

By Joseph L. Galloway

Congressional and presidential commissions are often appointed to study problems everyone wishes would just go away, or die of old age, and often in the end entire tracts of timberland are sacrificed to print long, dull volumes full of not very much. But once in a blue moon along comes a commission that believes its creators really wanted it to provide both constructive criticism and some recommendations on how to find a reasonable solution to a problem or a situation.

One such happy event occurred this week when the congressional commission appointed to study a Pentagon proposal to shut down most of America's overseas military bases and bring home 70,000 U.S. troops and their families opened its mouth and made some sense.

Even as communities all across the nation braced for Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's hit list of domestic military bases he wants to shut down, the Overseas Basing Commission in an interim report to Congress and President George W. Bush suggested that the rush to close our overseas bases be immediately slowed and all the ramifications considered.

It just doesn't makes a great deal of sense to me, to be shutting down "excess" bases at the very time you're planning to bring home large numbers of troops to be stationed where there are not yet facilities to house or provide training areas for them. Especially when the costs of constructing such housing and facilities are to be paid for by the not-yet-realized savings of having said troops on U.S. soil. Something doesn't make sense here; essentially that future, as-yet-unrealized savings are to pay for capital improvements needed more-or-less now.

Many permanent U.S. military bases overseas would be shut down and replaced by forward operating sites in remote places such as Uzbekistan -- bare-bones establishments maintained by contractors or the host countries. Those sites, some consisting of no more than a barren airfield, could in theory be swiftly occupied by troops and equipment flown in from the United States in case of a crisis.

The Department of Defense has estimated the cost of this shift at approximately $10 billion for items directly attributable to bringing the troops back home and finding new home bases for their units. The Overseas Basing Commission said that an independent cost analysis it ordered put the actual cost at around $20 billion.

It pointedly noted that spending estimates aren't the only thing off with the Pentagon plans. The commission said the action proposed by Defense "is larger than just the Department of Defense," has ramifications that will affect U.S. strategy and national security for decades to come, and should be open to careful review by other government departments and agencies most affected.

The commission also urged Congress to hold hearings and "provide more rigorous oversight" of the Defense basing proposal, even as the plans are reviewed by other departments, including State, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, Commerce, Treasury, the National Intelligence director, and the Office of Budget and Management.

"The detailed synchronization of so massive a realignment of forces requires that the pace of events be slowed and re-ordered," the Overseas Basing Commission members wrote in their interim report.

That the report trampled on toes in the Defense Department can be inferred from the briefing hastily convened a day after the commission news conference this week. Ryan Henry, principal undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and acting Under Secretary of the Army Ray Dubois took issue with parts of the commission report.

Henry said the pullback from overseas bases has been "coordinated from the beginning" with the State Department, the National Security Council and other areas of government, while Congress has been briefed "more than 45 times" on the emerging plan.

Henry also challenged the idea that the shutdown, planned between 2006 and 2011, was moving too quickly. He said Defense was being "deliberate, thoughtful and flexible," and the plan was subject to change as the world situation evolves.

The commission members urged that at least one heavy Army brigade should be left in Europe, and equipment for another heavy brigade pre-positioned aboard ships in the theater to provide greater flexibility.

These days, a heavy brigade is the absolute smallest effective combat formation which can operate more-or-less independently. Anything less constitutes mere spear-carriers and honor guards in terms of the European theatre.

The report also expressed reservations as to whether Defense has given sufficient thought to the additional requirements that troop deployments from the United States to forward bases will place on already overtaxed Air Force transport aircraft and crews.

Right. Let's count on moving lots of divisions on non-existant or superannuated airframes. Hope is still not a plan.

Making such a radical change in our overseas posture at a time when the American military is already fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terrorism and is stretched to the max could lead to costly miscalculations both tactically and strategically.

The Overseas Basing Commission did not argue with Rumsfeld's basic premise that our network of overseas military bases was originally keyed to Cold War objectives and needs to be realigned to support current and future needs.

They are just asking that the problem, and suggested solution, be more carefully considered and the rush to enact those changes be slowed while that thinking is done.

The commission, meanwhile, promised a final report sometime in August.

Congress and the American people just may get their money's worth out of this commission.

JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.

WT - Marines Advised To Drop Charges

Washington Times
May 14, 2005 Pg. 1

Marines Advised To Drop Charges

By Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times

An investigating officer has recommended that the Marine Corps drop murder charges against 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, who fatally shot two Iraqi insurgents a year ago during a raid on a hideout in the "Triangle of Death."

The 16-page report from Lt. Col. Mark E. Winn labels as "extremely suspect" the prosecution's chief witness, Sgt. Daniel L. Coburn, whom Lt. Pantano had removed as a squad leader weeks before the April 15, 2004, shooting.

"The government was not able to produce credible evidence or testimony that the killings were premeditated," Col. Winn wrote in his report, a copy of which was obtained yesterday by The Washington Times.

"I think now [Sgt. Coburn] is in a position where he has told his story so many times, in so many versions that he cannot keep his facts straight anymore," Col. Winn wrote of the chief witness.

"There is only one eyewitness to events that precipitated the shooting, and that is 2nd Lt. Pantano," he wrote in the report, dated Thursday.

Col. Winn's decision follows a five-day pretrial hearing last month at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Lt. Pantano's home base. The role of Col. Winn, like Lt. Pantano an infantry officer, was to conduct the hearing and decide whether a court-martial is warranted.

Defense attorney Charles Gittins argued during the Article 32 hearing that Lt. Pantano fired in self-defense after the two captured Iraqis moved toward him and ignored his warning, in Arabic, to stop. The two were unarmed.

Col. Winn recommended to Maj. Gen. Richard Huck, 2nd Marine Division commander, that all criminal charges be dropped, including murder and destruction of the Iraqis' vehicle. The colonel also proposed that Lt. Pantano face administrative punishment for firing too many rounds at the two men.

"Throughout this case, 2nd Lt. Pantano has been consistent with his account of what happened at the vehicle," Col. Winn wrote. "There has been no eyewitness produced that can refute 2nd Lt. Pantano's version of what transpired at the vehicle."

The case drew national attention because the Marine Corps charged Lt. Pantano, 33, with offenses that could bring the death penalty. Critics said the Corps was, in effect, second-guessing the officer at a time of heightened violence in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad, where Iraqi insurgents were killing Marines with regularity.

Lt. Pantano also boasts a storybook life: After serving in the Marines as an enlisted man and graduating from New York University, he embarked on careers on Wall Street and then as a TV producer. But he gave up a comfortable Manhattan lifestyle and talked his way back into the Marine Corps at 31 to fight terrorists after the September 11 attacks by al Qaeda.

Gen. Huck, who is now leading troops in Operation Matador in northwestern Iraq, can accept Col. Winn's recommendations or overrule them and order a court-martial of Lt. Pantano.

"Based on the thoroughness and degree of detail that the investigating officer has offered," Mr. Gittins said in an interview yesterday, "the convening authority [Gen. Huck] should accept that recommendation to withdraw and dismiss all charges."

Lt. Pantano, the married father of two, declined to comment. He did not testify at the hearing, but had submitted a sworn statement to investigators.

In an exclusive interview with The Times earlier this year, Lt. Pantano said that he fired at the two insurgents only because he thought his life was in danger.

"Units were getting ambushed all over the place, including my own," he said. "I was in fear of my life."

On that April evening a year ago, Lt. Pantano led part of his Easy Company platoon to a house in the town of Mahmudiyah. Recently captured Iraqis had indicated it could be an insurgent hide-out.

Two Iraqis saw the Marines approach on foot, got in a car and took off. They stopped when the Marines fired warning shots. Inside the house Marines found AK-47s, mortar-sighting equipment, bomb-making ingredients and literature praising Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Lt. Pantano had the two Iraqis search their own car, as one of his men had done earlier. At this point, the officer said, the two turned and rushed toward him and he emptied two magazines of from his M-16 rifle.

Neither of the other two Americans present, Sgt. Coburn and Navy corpsman George Gobles, saw the initial shots fired. Sgt. Coburn did not immediately file a complaint, but later told a number of other Marines he thought the shooting was unjustified. Based on his complaints, an investigation ensued.

Sgt. Coburn testified the two men were shot in the back. There was no autopsy. Col. Winn's report said the prosecution never established the two insurgents' identities.

Mr. Gittins argued that back wounds seen in photographs of the two were exit wounds. Col. Winn wrote, "There was no credible evidence presented by the government that proved these men were not shot in the front."

Col. Winn had some harsh language for Sgt. Coburn, labeling him "extremely suspect" and saying the enlisted man had a motive to harm Lt. Pantano. The officer had removed him as a squad leader and written potentially career-ending fitness reports.

"It is my opinion that Sgt. Coburn never really understood what had transpired during the shooting, and as time went by, he invented details to corroborate what he had built in his mind as what had happened," Col. Winn wrote. "Sgt. Coburn does not tell one consistent story throughout this whole case."

Lt. Pantano has since resigned from the Marine Corps.

WT - Colonel Loses Command For Abuses

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050512-111801-2679r.htm

Washington Times
May 13, 2005 Pg. 12

Colonel Loses Command For Abuses

By Associated Press

A leading figure in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal has been relieved of his command, the Army announced yesterday. It also confirmed that the officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, had been reprimanded and fined but will not face criminal prosecution.

This effectively ends COL Pappas' career. He may find a staff job somewhere until retirement claims him, but he'll not see another command.

An announcement from U.S. Army Europe in Germany, said Gen. B.B. Bell, the top Army general in Europe, relieved Col. Pappas of command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade.

Col. Pappas had faced the possibility of criminal prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but instead received what the military calls nonjudicial punishment under Article 15 of the code.

Col. Pappas is among the highest ranking officers whose actions have been scrutinized in the abuse scandal. Only one general -- Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the Army Reserve -- has been punished. She was demoted to colonel and relieved of command of the 800th Military Police Brigade.

Army officials speaking on the condition of anonymity revealed on Wednesday that Col. Pappas had been reprimanded and fined, but they said the question of whether he would lose his command had not been settled.

Yesterday's announcement said the punishment for Col. Pappas was effective from Monday.
Col. Pappas was not accused of ordering abuse or participating in it, but the Army said some soldiers under his command were involved and he was faulted for two instances of dereliction of duty.

Maj. Gen. Bennie Williams, who decided not to press criminal charges, ordered Col. Pappas to repay $8,000 in salary and gave him an official letter of reprimand. Taken together the penalties essentially stop him from being promoted in rank and thus hasten the end of his career.

Gen. Williams is commander of the 21st Theater Support Command. He was given the task of deciding the Pappas case because Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the 5th Corps commander who might otherwise have handled it, had to recuse himself in light of questions about his own role in Abu Ghraib. The Army recently cleared Gen. Sanchez and two other generals of wrongdoing in the matter.

Col. Pappas had the option of refusing the nonjudicial punishment and contesting the accusations in a court martial, but decided against it.

The Army said it verified a finding of previous Army investigations that Col. Pappas had failed to obtain approval from superior commanders before authorizing an unsanctioned interrogation method: the presence of military dogs during interrogations as a method of scaring prisoners.

The Army also said Col. Pappas was derelict in his duties by failing to ensure that soldiers under his command were informed of, trained in and supervised in the application of interrogation procedures.

That's a pretty clear indication that he's being held responsible for abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib.

See also: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2005/05/wp-abu-ghraib-officer-gets-reprimand.html

BG - Military Culture Rooted In Geography

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/05/10/military_culture_rooted_in_geography/

Boston Globe
May 10, 2005

Military Culture Rooted In Geography

By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Columnist

WASHINGTON -- Many military families around the country expressed frustration during last year's presidential campaign. Worried about the progress of the war in Iraq, and especially whether soldiers were adequately protected, they were receptive to Senator John F. Kerry's arguments.

Still, most said they would vote for a president who seemed more attuned to the culture of the military, its loyalty to the chain of command, its patriotic sense of the rightness of America's mission in the world, its commitment to maintaining a supportive home front.

Candidate Kerry's apparent defeatism shone through and cost him military votes.

President Bush's understanding of the military culture came across in his words. But it also came through in his Texas manner, the way he looked, acted, and spoke.

To many military families -- even in places like Ohio, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania -- military culture is almost synonymous with the culture of the South and Southwest. Patriotism is expressed with a Southern twang, while nagging questions are raised in a Northeastern whine. Even a Vietnam War hero from the Northeast came across as too steeped in intellectualism and internationalism to understand military families.

Oddly for a Boston writer, Mr. Canellos seems unaware that nearby South Boston (or "Southie") is a historic bastion of old-line working class families whose sons and daughters serve in uniform, particularly the uniform of the U.S. Marines, in numbers far outstripping their more elitist New England neighbors. Also, Massachutsetts may not be quite so representative of other parts of New England in this regard, especially in contrast to New Hampshire or Maine.

These days, it is hard to tell how many military values are intrinsic to the military and how many are simply native to the South and Southwest, where so many active-duty soldiers are stationed. Attitudes widely regarded as military are common to many in the Sun Belt, and military families probably picked them up there.

By contrast, there are not a lot of children in New England with a father or mother wearing a military uniform every day. The majority of children in New England are growing up without classmates whose parents are in active-duty service. Having a mom or dad working on an Army base may seem as exotic as having them work at a Buddhist temple.

Working on an Army base isn't nearly the same thing as being on active duty. The writer is confusing jobs for local citizens with the armed forces.

Not to denigrate the contributions to readiness that many civilian employees, whether contractor or civil service, make in the conduct of their employment on military bases, but it's not the same thing.

In 1988, 30,600 active-duty military personnel were stationed in New England; today, fewer than 12,700 wear the uniform every day. Bases that were almost entire towns, such as Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire and Loring Air Force Base in Maine, were closed; in Massachusetts, active-duty operations ended at Fort Devens in Ayer, South Weymouth Naval Air Station, and parts of Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford.

I'm trying to recall during which administration, post-1988, so many of these bases were closed.

This week, the Defense Department is likely to announce its latest schedule of base closings, and members of Congress around the country are preparing to argue why bases in their districts should be spared. In Massachusetts, the most intensive efforts are focused on Hanscom, where the state is offering to invest in the area around the base to keep it viable as a magnet for high-tech research.

The effort, a joint venture of Governor Mitt Romney and the state's congressional delegation, may pay off. But there are larger reasons to preserve the remaining bases in New England, from Hanscom to the region's only remaining active-duty air base in Brunswick, Maine, and the naval base in New London, Conn.

The only "larger reason" that seems to count nowadays is contributions to current operations or to transformation. Larger demographic or political considerations aren't considered relevant.

Many politicians and analysts note that having the military centered in the Republican-dominated South and Southwest serves to widen divisions in a country already split along regional lines. It turns the military into a Sun Belt industry, like making textiles or growing oranges. It furthers the process of turning military values into Southern values.

Or is it more a case of the Northern regions rejecting military values for something . . . else?

Stationing a disproportionate share of military families in the Sun Belt reduces pressure on both parties to compete for military votes in national politics. The GOP can claim to be the only party that understands the military way of life, and military families will vote Republican whether they agree with GOP policies or not. When identity politics takes root, critical thinking -- among voters and politicians -- is diminished.

So far, the country has been fortunate that red state/blue state divisions have sparked anger only in politics: Regional tensions have not played out as fiercely on the ground, in terms of actual prejudices and resentments.

Is the writer attempting to resurrect some sort of civil war bogeyman here?

The cause of national understanding cannot be furthered by clustering military installations in warmer climates, any more than it would be furthered by having all universities pack up and move north. This week's decisions on base closings could have implications for the whole country, not just cities and towns with bases on the chopping block.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.

WT - Iranian influence

http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20050511-101531-9967r.htm

Embassy Row

By James Morrison

Iranian influence

He survived 14 assassination attempts as governor of Iraq's Diyala province and is ready to risk his life again as a candidate in the parliamentary elections expected in December.

Dr. Abdullah Rasheed al-Jabouri, a dentist by profession, also learned about dirty politics when his opponents on the provincial election commission blocked him from running in the January elections by leaving his name off the ballot.

Dr. al-Jabouri, who made enemies among Islamic extremists by governing as a secular leader, only learned about the stunt on election day when the ballots were made public.

"There was cheating and deception. It was not a fair election," he said over lunch yesterday at The Washington Times.

His one-year term ended in March, and he returned to England to resume his dental practice. However, he is already planning his political comeback, and he plans to travel to Iraq soon to open his campaign.

Dr. al-Jabouri was in Washington to talk about the threat facing Iraq from its old enemy, Iran, which shares a border with Diyala province, and to urge the United States to remove the Iranian resistance from a blacklist of terrorist groups on which they were included during the Clinton administration.

This is an interesting proposal from an Iraqi politician. My impression thusfar was that the Iraqi government wants little or nothing to do with the Iranian resistance.

"There's question today that Iran is behind many terrorist attacks, especially against civilians and anti-fundamentalist politicians," he told a congressional hearing this week.

This is even a question?

"In Diyala province ... we managed to capture many Iranian agents or Iraqi and foreign nationals who were on Iran's payroll and had received training in terrorist activities."

Dr. al-Jabouri told the Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus in the House that the United States made a mistake in 2003 when U.S. forces bombed the camps of the military wing of the resistance, the People's Mojahedin, which had operated from Diyala since 1986. He said they provided security against Iranian infiltration.

That's one way of putting it. The PMOI are blood enemies of the Badr Corps, also known as the Badr Brigade, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia which has gained a certain amount of, call it, respectability, in post-war Iraq. They also have a bone to pick with agents of "the evil mullah regime."

"I believe the bombing of the Mojahedin camps at the outset of the war was a major blunder, even more so was the U.S. decision to disarm them," he said.

What was absolutely brilliant was the PMOI command-enforced decision to not return fire, to not engage U.S. forces, and to seek an accommodation, in this case initially a ceasefire, as soon as possible.

"This left the entire province wide open to Iranian meddling and interference." Also at the Tuesday hearing, two Army officers who dealt with the Mojahedin testified about their cooperation and professionalism. The officers pointed out they were offering their personal opinions.

One might mention the concentrated "charm offensive" waged by the PMOI upon their U.S. guards.

Lt. Col. Thomas Cantwell, who commanded a military police battalion, guarded the Mojahedin at Camp Ashraf, where all of the resistance fighters were consolidated. He called them "cooperative" and "very disciplined, as a paramilitary force should be."

LTC Cantwell was very much a target of the PMOI charm offensive, as he was at least for a period of some months the commander of the MP battalion responsible for securing and protecting the PMOI compound at Ashraf Camp. He was aided in this by a company of Abrams tanks. I'm not saying he's wrong in his opinions, just that he was, like all U.S. officers who came into contact with the PMOI, presented with the best face of the PMOI.

Capt. Vivian Gembara, the Army lawyer who negotiated the Mojahedin disarmament agreement, said the United States should make "maximum use of the assets and potentials of this ally." "As a soldier and a lawyer," she said, "I believe it's time to change their classification as a terrorist organization."

The PMOI still being detained in Iraq were classified as having "Protected" status under the Geneva Convention. In my own, admittedly somewhat subjective, non-lawyer opinion, they meet those criteria under the Geneva Convention. Whether the U.S. recognizes the NCRI as a government-in-exile of Iran (we don't), their armed forces (the PMOI) go much further towards fulfilling the status of lawful combatants than did most Taliban forces in Afghanistan or most of the insurgent terrorists in today's Iraq. Except that they took great pains not to become belligerants against us.

It's not necessary that we recognize them as an army so long as they behave like one. And in most respects, they meet those criteria. That gets them protected status.

The classification as a terrorist organization comes from the State Department and dates back to the Clinton Administration.

•Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.

old war buddy visits

This is not your father's, or grandfather's, "old war buddy." For one thing, the "old war" is still in progress. For another, the buddy in question is a 28 year old blonde graduate student.

L. is the first of hopefully many old friends from GW2 who will come to visit the At-Arms family here while posted in Euroland. She's on The Continent with the military for the summer, doing necessary work, before returning to grad school somewhere out west for her final semester.

L. was one of many such undergraduate and graduate school students who put down their books and or graduate assistantships when their country called and their reserve or national guard units were mobilized to topple, successively, the Taliban and Saddamite regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. L. also did a tour just a brief couple of years ago in Kosovo. It was great to see her.

My wife, Madam Consul-At-Arms, over some quantity of alcohol, was treated to some Iraq reminiscences which she'd heard far too many times already, as well as some she hadn't quite managed to hear from me before. She also got to hear someone else's perspective on our shared and adjacent experiences, as well as the comfort of someone who could appreciate her own sacrifices as a spouse on the home front.

We're hopeful that we can visit L. over in Bavaria while L.'s here and let her show us around. It's rumored that the Bavarians have been stockpiling beer for just such an eventuality.

NYT - Rumsfeld Seeks Leaner Army And Full Term As Defense Secretary

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/politics/11rumsfeld.html

The New York Times requires registration to read this article. Registration is free.

I'm still catching up with articles I cached as I prepared to move overseas, some of which has begun to become a bit dated.

New York Times
May 11, 2005 Pg. 1

Rumsfeld Seeks Leaner Army And Full Term As Defense Secretary

By Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt

WASHINGTON, May 10 - Ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to define his legacy, and he cuts the question short: "Don't. Hold off on it. There will be plenty of time."

With a full list of policy initiatives ahead and travel plans penciled in through the Beijing Olympics of 2008, Mr. Rumsfeld gives every indication of serving out the rest of the Bush administration, confounding those who predicted his departure even after President Bush refused, twice, to accept his resignation over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

"I don't think of myself as a short-timer," said Mr. Rumsfeld, who turns 73 in July.

His goal in this pivotal year is to keep Iraq and Afghanistan at bay so he can turn to closing bases at home and realigning global forces even as combat continues; overhauling personnel policy while dealing with a crisis in recruiting; redefining national security strategy while confronting alarming nuclear developments in North Korea and Iran; and drafting a disciplined military budget - one that does not rely on emergency spending to scrape through year after budget-busting year.

"At bay?" How about winning? Oh wait, this is The Newspaper Of Record we're excerpting.

But across the Pentagon, officials acknowledge that the twin tasks of building Iraqi security forces and defeating the insurgency stand in the way of Mr. Rumsfeld's longstanding ambitions to fundamentally transform the nation's military into something leaner, more agile and thoroughly modern. Success in Iraq would allow troop withdrawals to begin, relieving strains on budgets and personnel.

An eventuality to be much anticipated, nay, to be prayed for; but in the meantime, so sorry about those stretched budgets.

Opening up a new front of controversy, Mr. Rumsfeld is to unveil his list of recommended domestic base closings on Friday. It is sure to provoke opposition from communities that stand to lose the economic benefits of being host to the military.

Obviously the BRAC list is now out and causing lots of local and congressional concerns.

By midsummer, the Pentagon's senior policy aides and top officers will convene a meeting to overhaul military strategy for the next four years. A final report due early next year, a Quadrennial Defense Review required by Congress, will try to balance strategy better with budgets, weapons and troop strength. Everything is on the table, including aircraft carriers, new fighters and broad strategic goals. Here, too, any change that upsets the status quo will meet some opposition.

In an interview, Mr. Rumsfeld compared the Pentagon he inherited to a factory where there were "conveyor belts going by and they were loaded four, five, six years ago, and they were not connected with each other." He said budgets did not fit weapons, which did not fit strategy.

Mr. Rumsfeld is opening the Bush administration's second term as if he were an ambitious novice, not five years into his second tour in a job he first held 30 years ago, cognizant that this is perhaps his first year not necessarily dominated by the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath.

If that's true, then he's not paying attention. Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of Guantanamo Bay, should very much be keeping his attention focused. As should all the rest of the GWOT. If it's not holding the majority of his attention, perhaps he needs to step down in favor of someone who can keep their eye on the proper ball.

It's not that "Transformation" isn't something that's properly within the purvue of a SecDef, it's just that fighting, and winning, the war we're currently fighting should take a higher priority, in my view.

Even his sharpest critics - generals and admirals who have endured the wire-brush treatment of his relentless questioning, and senior civilians across the executive branch who have fought bitter internal battles with Mr. Rumsfeld and his policy proxies - agree that he got one thing right: Mr. Rumsfeld is forcing the Department of Defense to think about warfare differently and, just as important, to think in new ways about its daily business practices.

The military and naval forces are not a business. One of the lingering malignancies from the Vietnam War and SecDef MacNamara was the improper interjection of "business practices" into what aren't properly "business" matters. And I say this as someone whose undergraduate field of study was Business Administration.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview, "There is not a D.O.D. process of any sort that we haven't turned on its ear in the past four years."

Mr. Rumsfeld produced an eight-page list of initiatives and accomplishments on his watch, many of them beneath the radar of public attention but nonetheless substantial changes in how the military prepares for and wages war, and how the Pentagon gets through the day.

The military's map of the world has been redrawn to divide the globe more rationally among regional combatant commanders, and new responsibilities, financing and personnel were given to the specialized commands, in particular, ones responsible for Special Operations and for strategic planning and targeting.

The United States' nuclear strategy has been rewritten, as have regional war-fighting plans, and efforts are under way to restructure and relocate the forces permanently based overseas.
The goal is to reduce the number of large cold-war-era bases, especially in Germany, in favor of access to countries closer to future battlefronts across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

The military is rebalancing the responsibilities of active-duty personnel and reservists to help ease strains on the Army and Marine Corps, which are experiencing serious recruiting problems.

One set of overwhelming questions remains: whether the American public and Congress are exhausted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whether enough money will be available for transformation to a high-tech military while still supporting a conventional force deployed to combat zones.

Still waiting for the President to lead on this issue, to rally the country, to put forth something resembling a call to arms and put the country and the American public, at least mentally, on something approaching a war footing. Of course congressional and public support are ebbing, why shouldn't they?

"He doesn't have the money to do it," said Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Congressional committees are just starting their detailed review of Mr. Rumsfeld's budget request, work that could take two months or more to complete.

Mr. Rumsfeld says the Sept. 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not delayed transformation or even been a distraction, but have energized the effort.

I find it infinitely disturbing to learn that SecDef Rumsfeld was not distracted from his transformation efforts by the Global War On Terror. I found it immensely distracting, but then, I was in it. If the Secretary of Defense is not in it, then he should be replaced.

"It has been the global war on terror and the tasks that we've been assigned that has provided added impetus to doing the things that absolutely had to be done in this department," he said.

As Mr. Rumsfeld presses his transformation agenda, he still confronts bruised relations with lawmakers and even some in the administration over Iraq policy and the fallout from the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal.

Critics blame Mr. Rumsfeld for invading Iraq with too few troops and embracing overly optimistic assumptions about what would happen once Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

"When it became evident that we were going to face a determined and prolonged insurgency, he was very resistant to increasing troop levels, stepping up production of up-armored Humvees, and modifying the game plan," said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

In the interview, Mr. Rumsfeld exhibited a trademark mix, by turns combative and introspective, as he deflected questions of how history would weigh the troubled aftermath of invading Iraq - particularly the Abu Ghraib scandal - against the changes he is still pressing.

"Anybody who knows anything about history knows that history gets written as a result of a whole series of things being said and aggregated over time, and people with perspective that don't have their nose pressed up against a deadline every five minutes," he said.

He said there was progress in the war on terror, but conceded that Al Qaeda was still able to function, saying, "Goodness knows, it doesn't take a genius to blow up a building."

Maybe not a genius, but the guy who thought up the 9/11 attacks qualifies as an evil genius in my book. Other blown up buildings may require different levels of intellectual agility.

Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.

Well at least that indicates he's not micromanaging.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers say winning support for his proposed changes has been made more difficult by Mr. Rumsfeld's often rocky relations with Congress. In public hearings and in news conferences, Mr. Rumsfeld, a former congressman from Illinois, can often barely disguise his impatience with lawmakers.

But he has worked harder to cultivate good ties with Congress, setting aside Tuesday and Thursday mornings for breakfast with House and Senate members at the Pentagon.
"It's been up and down," said Representative William M. Thornberry of Texas, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. "Some people think he doesn't kowtow to them enough."

Inside the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld is retooling his senior military and civilian leadership team from a war cabinet to corporate-style board of directors.

His new management team is led by Gordon R. England, his new deputy, who fits the traditional model of a No. 2 who oversees daily operations and avoids ideological battles. Mr. England, the Navy secretary, was once executive vice president of General Dynamics.

He will replace Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a lightning rod for critics of the Iraq war, who leaves in June to take over as head of the World Bank. Another senior policy figure criticized during the Iraq war effort, Douglas J. Feith, is also leaving, to be replaced by Eric Edelman, a career Foreign Service officer who previously was a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Rumsfeld is reshuffling his top military advisers, but with familiar faces. Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines who has worked closely with Mr. Rumsfeld for four years as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, will succeed General Myers as chairman this fall. Nominated as the new vice chairman is Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., who was Mr. Rumsfeld's top military aide until taking over the military's Joint Forces Command in 2002.

Mr. Rumsfeld works hard to leave his imprint on the bureaucracy, spending up to 10 hours a week on senior officer and civilian appointments. He has seeded like-minded protégés throughout the military's senior ranks to ensure that his priorities outlast him. He routinely reaches down to interview one-star and two-star officers for important jobs, a practice that some officers deride as a politically motivated "Rumsfeld sniff test."

In a conference room just a few paces from his office, Mr. Rumsfeld and 15 of his top civilian and military advisers meet at least twice a month to hammer out the most pressing issues, like budgets or base closings.

"They know each other, they know each other's strengths and weaknesses, they're comfortable talking in front of each other, which in many cases they had not been," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The decisions that flow out of that room are all of the big things that take place in this building."

Mr. Rumsfeld's admirers and critics alike say it is too soon to gauge his permanent stamp on the Pentagon or the military operations he set in motion.

"He hasn't finished the job, either in Iraq or with transformation," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has sparred frequently with the secretary. "So I don't know how you would judge him until the results are in."

Mr. Rumsfeld believes in measurements, whether electrical output from Baghdad or how many military jobs civilians could take over or how often a bespectacled defense secretary appears in editorial cartoons, many of which hang in his office.

Metrics. Wonderful. A perfectly logical business practice, but perhaps not the best way to gauge victory.

Each day, he tries to walk five miles through the Pentagon's polished corridors, keeping track with a pace meter on his belt. "He's an inveterate counter with a purpose," said Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman.

Some evenings, he plays squash with Mr. Di Rita or Vice Adm. James G. Stavridis, Mr. Rumsfeld's senior military assistant. In the fashion of his hometown, Chicago, Mr. Rumsfeld improves his odds against the younger men by putting in the fix: He refuses to allow the livelier, softer rubber ball favored by today's players.

"I play my game," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I play hardball."

WT - 2 D.C. lawyers charged with aiding illegals

http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20050512-101713-1977r.htm

2 D.C. lawyers charged with aiding illegals

By Gary Emerling
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Two local lawyers have been indicted on 149 counts of immigration fraud stemming from charges that they illegally helped illegal aliens obtain green cards, federal officials said yesterday. Officials said Irwin Jay Fredman, 72, of Bethesda, and Sergei Danilov, 44, of McLean, filed false labor certification applications with the U.S. Labor Department and false petitions for green cards with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on behalf of more than 140 aliens. Two legal assistants, Elnur Veliev, 21, of Silver Spring, and Alp Canseven, 30, of the District, also were indicted in the case.

If you can't trust an officer of the court, who can you trust?

"No one is above the law, especially those who are entrusted to enforce our laws," said U.S. Attorney Allen F. Loucks with the District of Maryland. "This indictment ensures that unscrupulous attorneys who exploit the immigration laws ... will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

It will be nice to see these guys go to jail; it encourages the others. I hate this sort of thing, in a professional sense.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said a federal grand jury indicted the lawyers April 26, and that the scheme began in April 2001.

The indictment was unsealed yesterday. The law firms of both lawyers also were named in the indictment. Mr. Fredman's law firm is at 2120 L St. NW; Mr. Danilov's firm is at 900 19th St. NW. All the defendants except for Mr. Canseven were arrested yesterday morning.

Officials said in some cases, the lawyers charged the aliens legal fees as high as $22,000.

Officials said the investigation began after clients told officials they paid a law firm large amounts of money to facilitate their entrance into the U.S. "We served several search warrants this morning and we're processing evidence retrieved from offices and homes," Mr. Boyd said yesterday. "This investigation is going to continue."

Most of the clients came from Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines and Russia, Mr. Boyd said.
Officials said the lawyers falsely listed Maryland businesses, including an employment agency, a pizza restaurant and a construction company, as sponsors of the alien applicants, then deposited the aliens' payments into companies they owned.

In my few weeks at post here in Euroland, I've already had folks from countries such as these provide all sorts of fraudulent information and documents. Most annoying. They eat up a lot of time which could better be used serving legitimate travelers.

The defendants also filed fraudulent claims stating that many of the aliens were sponsored to become medical and dental assistants, court documents show.

I'll make a note of that, for future reference.

Each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.

If convicted, Mr. Danilov, a Russian national, and Mr. Veliev, an Azerbaijani national, face deportation.

Excellent!

By the way, how is it that foreign nationals such as these may pass the bar and practise law in the United States?

SFTT - Generals Who Admit ‘Lack of Leadership’ Should Be Fired

http://www.sftt.org/main.cfm?actionId=globalShowStaticContent&screenKey=cmpDefense&htmlCategoryID=30&htmlId=2947

I'd just like to let Madam Hackworth and Mister Charles' article speak for itself.

06.24.2005

Generals Who Admit ‘Lack of Leadership’ Should Be Fired

By Eilhys England Hackworthand Roger Charles

News reports earlier this week carried one of the most shameful performances by a Marine general officer before a congressional committee since 1983, when then-Commandant P.X. Kelley tried to avoid any moral responsibility for not preventing the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American warriors, including 220 Marines.

Kelley tried to tap-dance away from accountability by actually claiming he "was not in the chain of command." While true on a strictly operational basis, his disavowal did not play well on Capitol Hill and was widely believed to have cost him his chance to serve as the first Marine Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Now we have the Nyland–Catto duck-and-weave show, where Gen. William "Spider" Nyland, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, and his one-star lackey, Brig. Gen. William Catto, the chief of Marine Corps Systems Command, confessed with straight faces to the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the lack of armored Humvees was due to "lack of leadership" – although they assured the committee that their same lousy leadership would somehow make sure the Humvees and military trucks that the Marines used in Iraq "would be adequately protected by December."

Their testimony dovetailed with the release of a damning Marine Corps Inspector General report this week – obtained from sources by SFTT – that reveals the overall deterioration of Marine ground equipment due to the high optempo in Iraq.

For a Marine general to admit such a crummy leadership failure costing the lives of Marines in combat and somehow keep his command is probably the most twisted Beltway stunt since Pentagon hypesters sucked The Washington Post into publishing their public relations spin on Pfc. Jessica Lynch fighting "to the last bullet."

If Nyland and Catto truly accepted personal responsibility for a failure of leadership which led to the deaths of their Marines, they had one, and only one, honorable course of action – to walk the plank and resign their commissions. A painful trip that would have meant kissing their generous pensions and juicy revolving-door perqs goodbye.

The silence from Marine Commandant Mike Hagee's office on this matter merely underlines that Nyland and Catto were playing the "take responsibility" ploy with his approval – and a gullible news media once again bought into a Pentagon con that let the perps prevail.

Hagee – who should have been taking responsibility and sitting at the table alongside Nyland and Catto – was instead running around presenting coins to the grieving parents of a Marine being buried at Arlington National Cemetery and a Marine being readied for surgery at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center. Certainly, he had the power to have given these folks something even more meaningful along with the coins – new and competent commanders with the right stuff to prevent other needless casualties.

By allowing these two admitted screw-ups to remain in uniform, Hagee sends the message to all Marines: getting your brother and sister warriors killed or maimed due to leadership failure can be overlooked if you're a Perfumed Prince.

For his passive endorsement of his officers' proclaimed negligence – negligence with lethal consequences – Hagee should be fired.

Then there's the silence from the office of SecDef Donald Rumsfeld.

How many more times will Rumsfeld's minions – our uniformed leaders in today's Defense Department – traipse up to Capitol Hill to offer yet one more tired-ass round of mea culpas for the lack of up-armored Humvees?

The next time Rumsfeld stands at the lectern in the Pentagon Press Room and carries on about how deeply he cares about the loss to life and limb among our nation's fighters, maybe one reporter will stand tall and ask, "Mr. Secretary, how do you square your profession of compassion with your failure – two years into the post-war phase – to provide the best-available level of protection to our troops who are most exposed to death and destruction on Iraqi roads?"

As with Hagee, Rumsfeld also should be fired for his conspicuous-by-his-silence endorsement of sorry leaders whose incompetence continues to get our fighters killed, crippled and blinded.

But don't hold your breath. Rumsfeld, Hagee, Nyland and Catto will slug on. And vehicles without adequate and available armor will continue to be torn up by IEDs. And crocodile tears will continue to be shed by Perfumed Princes during photo opportunities at Arlington, Bethesda and Walter Reed.

And more American kids will pay in blood for the uncaring incompetence of Rumsfeld & Co.

Eilhys England Hackworth is Chairman and CEO of Soldiers For The Truth. Roger Charles is President of SFTT. Charles can be reached at Sfttpres@aol.com. Send Feedback replies to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.