Just Above Sunset

Not many people read Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War - you have to be really into military theory for such things - but you could get a copy.  Consider this assessment from Library Journal -

The transformation of the American armed forces from the dispirited shell-shocked military at the close of the Vietnam era to the superbly trained, highly motivated, and universally respected victors in the Persian Gulf War is as dramatic a tale as any in American military history. Kitfield, an award-winning journalist on defense issues, follows the careers of dozens of army, navy, air force, and marine officers from their early service years in Vietnam to their success as commanders in the defeat of the Iraqis. While organizational and technical issues play a role, the book concentrates on the human aspect of this startling redirection of the U.S. military. A useful supplement to Michael Gordon’s The Generals’ War and Al Santoli’s overlooked Leading the Way, this is an essential addition to Vietnam and Persian Gulf War collections.

Not interested?  Those of us with an Army officer in the family are. Back in 1990, at West Point, when Colin Powell spoke at the graduation (it should have been J. Danforth Quayle, but someone the good sense to quash that), all the graduating cadets seemed the best of the best - thoughtful, courteous and ready to do their best.  Honor, Duty, Country - it didn’t seem farfetched at all.

But something has happened, and we may be back to square one again - with a dispirited shell-shocked military.  The young men (and a few young women) from that sunny afternoon did their best, and are still doing their best, but they face new issues now.  We jumped in the rental car, drove down to Newark and caught the plane for the coast.  The new second lieutenants went off to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and did a superb job.  They knew what they were doing - and did it well.

Now things are different.  Many say the Army is broken, again. That seems to be what Phillip Carter is saying in Broken Arrow, a column recently posted at SLATE. He says the Army broke in Iraq, in the current effort there, not the first.

Carter is an attorney with McKenna Long and Aldridge out here in Los Angeles - in their Government Contracts practice group - and a former Army officer, and an Iraq veteran. He might know. He did nine years of active and reserve service with military police and civil affairs units - and while on active duty before UCLA law school he did work testing and evaluating the Army’s digital battle command systems. In 2005 through 2006 he took a leave of absence from the law firm to serve in Iraq - with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, as an adviser to the Iraqi police. He’s been there.

And here’s his thesis -

The U.S. Army broke in the 1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War and the end of the draft. But if you ask officers who served during that period, few will recall the sounds of creaking planks, snapping beams, or rupturing buildings as the institution disintegrated. Instead, the crumbling occurred over time, becoming apparent only decades later.

Today’s Army is stretched past its breaking point by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sounds of its collapse may be faint enough for policymakers in Washington to ignore, but they are there. An exodus of junior and midlevel personnel illustrates the crisis. Their exit has forced the Army to apply tourniquets like “stop loss” to halt the hemorrhaging, and it has also dropped its standards for recruiting and retention.

His sources include retired Major General Robert H. Scales, the former commander of the Army War College, with this -

Bean counters in the Pentagon tell us that Army recruitment and retention are in good shape. Problem is, our cumbersome readiness reporting system only informs leaders in Washington of conditions on the ground many months after the force begins to break. Today, anecdotal evidence of collapse is all around. Past history makes some of us sensitive to anecdotes and distrustful of Pentagon statistics. The Army’s collapse after Vietnam was presaged by a desertion of mid-grade officers (captains) and non-commissioned officers. Many were killed or wounded. Most left because they and their families were tired and didn’t want to serve in units unprepared for war.

If we lose our sergeants and captains, the Army breaks again. It’s just that simple. That’s why these soldiers are still the canaries in the readiness coal-mine. And, again, if you look closely, you will see that these canaries are fleeing their cages in frightening numbers.

The lesson from this sad story is simple: When you fight a long war with a long-service professional Army, the force you begin with will not get any larger or better over the duration of the conflict. For that reason, today’s conditions are pretty much irreversible. There’s not much that money, goodwill or professed support for the troops can do. Another strange consequence is that the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We’re running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of warfighting missions.

He also refers us to his previous discussion of the new Army directive that attempts to alleviate the personnel crunch by retaining soldiers who had been previously designated for early discharge during their first term of enlistment because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons. That doesn’t even cover lowering recruitment standards to overlook felonies and gang activity. Times are tough indeed.

Now his is not impressed with returning units back to combat after less than a year at home, “leaving many with little time to train incoming soldiers and come together as a team.”

The problem is clear - “Four years into the war, the Army still has too few troops to persevere in Iraq and Afghanistan and too few deployed in each place to win.”

The recent decision to redeploy Army brigades to Iraq sooner and for longer tours in combat - to man “the surge” - is folly -

The entire active-duty force is either deployed, set to deploy soon, or within one year of coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan. Short of conscripting millions of Americans to rapidly build a larger military, contracting out for a larger force, or mobilizing the entire reserves at once, military leaders say they have no other choice - to surge in Iraq, they must reduce the time soldiers spend at home between deployments and lengthen their combat tours from 12 to 16 or 18 months. But sending troops to Iraq after such a short time to reorganize, refit, and retrain is a recipe for disaster.

It’s a matter of natural limits -

The combat-stress literature suggests there’s a finite limit to the amount of time that men and women can withstand combat. British historian Richard Holmes pegged this figure at approximately 60 days of sustained combat. In Iraq, we often wondered what our finite limit was, given the stresses of our advisory mission and the frequent attacks on our compound in downtown Baqubah. You can drink only so much chai with Iraqi leaders, and hit so many improvised explosive devices, before you burn out and need to go home. The soldiers and Marines fighting high-intensity operations in Ramadi probably had a different limit than my team, as did the troops assigned to staff duty in the International Zone or on major forward-operating bases.

To a senior Pentagon official studying a set of PowerPoint slides in the Pentagon, the question may seem academic. But to men under fire, it is anything but. Keeping units in combat for longer than a 12-month tour may push many troops past their breaking point, endangering both their lives and the mission.

And there’s the “other life” of those doing the fighting -

Today’s Army and Marine Corps is more family-oriented than other forces fielded recently by the United States. My deployment affected my family far more than me. I knew when I was safe and when I was in harm’s way; families can only guess, piecing together what they get from CNN and sporadic e-mails from their loved ones. Extending soldiers’ tours crushes the hopes of their families, who pin so much on a fixed return date. Soldiers have always received “Dear John” letters, but it’s different now, because so many troops have spouses and children - and because today’s troops are getting “Dear John” e-mails and phone calls in real time. Extending these tours creates enormous strain for military families. And shortening these families’ time together between deployments all but guarantees family issues on the next rotation. Problems at home quickly become problems in Iraq or Afghanistan, forcing combat leaders to take time away from their mission to advise soldiers about family matters.

That is a distraction, and there is the matter of the “weekend warriors” -

These extensions create enormous strain for reservists, 80,373 of whom are now on active duty. Unlike regular Army troops, who currently serve about a year in Iraq, reservists typically serve between 16 and 18 months away from their families - 12 months in Iraq and then four to six months for training and processing before and after their tours. Extending the combat-tour length for reservists will create tours close to two years.

The Pentagon’s plans also call for many reservists to be called up for a second or third time in as many years. This effectively rewrites the social contract of the reserves. During the 1980s and ’90s, soldiers joined the reserves on the understanding that they would train one weekend per month and deploy for either discrete missions or “the big one.” Over the last three years, the Pentagon has gradually transformed these part-time forces from a “strategic” into an “operational” reserve, meaning they can now expect to deploy one out of every five to six years, or more, depending on the situation.

So, guess what?  Many reservists are bailing out.  That just makes things worse -

Reserve units now frequently deploy to Iraq as composite units, victims of so many personnel exits and transfers that their soldiers often don’t even meet until they are called up to active duty. Consequently, the reserve units deploying to Iraq today are not as good as the units that went in 2003-04, and there are few reservists left to fight elsewhere should the need arise.

Carter is just not impressed with Senator McCain saying again and again that the only thing worse than a broken army is a defeated army -

… this puts the cart before the horse, because in this case, the breaking of America’s military will lead to defeat, both now and later. America cannot afford to send untrained, unready, or distracted troops into complex conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sure, but what are you going to do?  Rumsfeld, when faced with some angry soldiers who wondered why they had to scavenge in Baghdad junkyards for anything they could find to up-amour their Humvees, famously said, “You got to war with the Army you have, no the one you’d like to have.” He didn’t add, “Until you have no Army at all.”  He just sarcastically told them to suck it up.

Maybe some of those soldiers heard echoes the movie the movie they took their kids to see long ago and a world away - “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”  Thanks a bunch, Lord Farquaad.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show no sign of ending any time soon - “The Petraeus plan will have U.S. forces deployed in Iraq for years to come. Does anybody running for president realize that?”

Now what?

Thursday, March 29, 2007 - and there were two big stories in Washington. They both looked like trouble for the administration.

If you are the president, what are you going to do when the former chief of staff to your Attorney General says, under oath in a public hearing, that as far as he can tell, the Attorney General flat-out lied to congress, and to everyone who wanted to know what was going on?  That really is what it come down to -

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was briefed regularly over two years on the firings of federal prosecutors, his former top aide said Thursday, disputing Gonzales’ claims he was not closely involved with the dismissals. The testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Kyle Sampson, the attorney general’s former chief of staff, newly undercut Gonzales’ already shaky credibility.

Gonzales and former White House counsel Harriet Miers made the final decision on whether to fire the U.S. attorneys last year, Sampson said.

“I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate,” Sampson told the committee as it inquired into whether the dismissals were politically motivated.

“I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign,” Sampson said.

Okay, the man did not say Gonzales lied.  He didn’t say that at all.  He just said that what Gonzales had been saying wasn’t accurate. There may be a subtle legal distinction there.

Whether that matters may be moot if Gonzales resigns - but he may not. The president is unlikely to ask him to do that.  Gonzales, after all, was in from the start - Bush’s state Attorney General in Texas, then his White House Counsel, then bumped up to Attorney General, not working for Bush any longer but for us all. Yes, he may have missed the conceptual difference between those last two positions, but then he is not the brightest legal light in the universe, as the arch-conservative (or what passes for conservative) National Review explains -

While we defended him from some of the outlandish charges made during his confirmation hearings, we have never seen evidence that he has a fine legal mind, good judgment, or managerial ability. Nor has his conduct at any stage of this controversy gained our confidence.

His claim not to have been involved in the firings suggests that he was either deceptive or inexcusably detached from the operations of his own department.

The editors prefer he resign.  The White House will cancel their subscription, no doubt. The hapless Harriet Miers - the White House Counsel after Gonzales was elevated - was nominated by Bush to the Supreme Court. Maybe Alberto is next. If he is anything, the president is defiant - those who question his decisions, particularly about those he appoints, will get the finger. That hasn’t worked out that well so far, but the impulse is there.

Kevin Drum does the heavy lifting and summarizes the day’s testimony -

Least surprising revelation: that Alberto Gonzales was indeed involved in discussions about firing those U.S. Attorneys. “I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions about U.S. attorney removals is accurate,” Sampson said. In other words, Gonzales lied. Knock me other with a feather.

Most bizarre revelation: that Sampson recommended firing Patrick Fitzgerald in the middle of his investigation into Plamegate. “That was a piece of bad judgment on my behalf to even raise it,” Sampson said. No kidding.

Most heartfelt revelation: that Sampson is all too aware he screwed up. “Looking back on all of this … in hindsight I wish the department hadn’t gone down this road at all,” he said. Roger that, Kyle.

You can find Kyle Sampson’s odd answer to that in the Los Angeles Times’ account, and it’s a classic - “I don’t remember keeping a very good file,” he said. “It was a chart and notes that I would dump into my lower right desk drawer.”

Oh. 

Or as Drum comments -

And that, supposedly, was that. There were two years of plans to fire these guys, but we’re supposed to believe that no one really kept any notes and nobody really knows why these guys were selected. It was just a gestalt sort of thing.

Unbelievable. But which is worse: that he’s lying or that he’s telling the truth?

Take your choice.  It’s a mess.

But the real mess was the Senate vote, following a parallel vote days before in the House, setting up a showdown -

A defiant, Democratic-controlled Senate approved legislation Thursday calling for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq within a year, propelling Congress closer to an epic, wartime veto confrontation with President Bush.

This was the supplemental spending bill, an emergency measure to fund the war (or the augmented occupation, if you wish).  The president can have the money - as long as he agrees to at least try to wind things down and get the troops out of combat next year.  There are strings attached - including more funds for the Veterans Administration and this and that about assuring proper equipment and rest and all that “readiness” stuff - but the main string attached in this case is the demand that he change direction - move from “combat only” to diplomacy with support and training and security and rebuilding for that new nation. Otherwise there will be no funding.

Of course, the president is a Texan. He understands a showdown when he sees one, and at his press briefing he went into full OK Corral mode. Yes, this is not Tombstone, Arizona with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Virgil and Morgan Earp facing the Clantons and McLaurys - not Wednesday afternoon, October 26, 1881 - but it will do.  He will veto any such bill, and has the votes in Congress to sustain the veto.  And then the Democrats will be sorry. The troops will have no money and it will be ALL THEIR FAULT - or more accurately, the Department of Defense will not have the funds to pay the troops or feed them or equip them and they’ll all die and the bad guys will have won, all because of the damned Democrats, not him.  He said what the Democrats’ proposal “is well outside of the mainstream.”  (The evidence suggests otherwise.)

Here’s one angry response to that (with an instructive video at the link) -

Bush’s veto pen kills troops.

Bush’s veto sends troops to Iraq without rest, without armor, and without training. No president in American history has ever abandoned troops in the field to die. But George W. Bush is about to show you he’s “man enough” to do it, just to prove he can.

That’s because he’s not serious about accomplishing anything in Iraq. Nobody could look at his record of failure there and conclude otherwise.

As for his concern about setting an artificial deadline, with or without this bill there’s already an artificial deadline: January 20, 2009. Because it’s simply not physically possible to elect another president so willfully ignorant and as openly traitorous as this one. In short, George W. Bush is the only person on the planet who believes this occupation can feasibly last one day longer than his term in office. So anyone who pretends that moving the date up a few months is going to make a damned bit of difference in this disaster just isn’t doing any serious thinking about the situation.

But in the meantime, George W. Bush will veto troop readiness, and then lock himself in his bunker while they die.

And he’s chomping at the bit to do it, too

Oh my. All he’s saying is that congress has no authority or right to tell the commander-in-chief how to run a war. The constitution says so.  That’s in the rulebook, or the owner’s manual or whatever.  You could look it up.  All congress is saying is that, since they have the job to fund or not fund any government activity, including a war, they are, in effect, declaring this one is essentially over, and they’ll be glad to fund efforts to deal with terrorism and to stabilize things in the Middle East, but not what we’re up to now. The constitution says so - they control the money.  You could also look that up.

It is a bit of a showdown.

Many have suggested that the Democrats are going about this all wrong - they should give him the money, all of it, with no strings attached. That way the war is his and no one can blame them for anything.  Let him hang himself with the rope they provide - as everyone knows there is no good outcome to be had here. That would be good politics - perhaps the end of the Republican Party. The problem there is all the dead people from this point forward, and the enmity of the whole world. Good politics can be ghoulish - but Machiavelli explained that already, and the Democrats don’t seem to want to go there.

But maybe it is time for a reality check.

Fred Kaplan offers that in Listen Up, Mr. President -

Two myths have sprung up around the House and Senate bills that require President Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. One is that he would have to pull out all the troops. The other is that, if Bush vetoes the final bill (as he is nearly certain to do), the war - and all other military activities- would grind to a halt, leaving the troops in the lurch, bereft of basic ammo and supplies.

Both myths are false, the product of spin.

He explains that the Pentagon has any number of ways to reroute money “if a veto locks the emergency-spending bill in temporary limbo.”  That limbo is the Easter recess. And too, both the House and Senate bills keep our troops in Iraq, just doing different things - “less-ambitious missions.”

So there’s that veto, but its not what is seems -

The congressional demands for a troop withdrawal are merely sections of the much larger bill to provide $96 billion in emergency spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A veto would kill not only the language on withdrawal but also the $96 billion.

Administration officials invoke the time when President Bill Clinton vetoed the Republican Congress’ budget and House Speaker Newt Gingrich walked away, forcing the federal government to shut down - a series of events that politically tarnished the Republicans in the long run. Officials warn that the same thing will happen to the congressional Democrats if they force Bush to shut down the war.

That’s not going to happen. A story in today’s edition of the Hill outlines several ways the Pentagon could still get funds to the troops. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates could “reprogram” money from one account to another. He could shift “unobligated balances” from the operations and maintenance accounts. If worst comes to worst, he could invoke the Civil War-era Feed and Forage Act, which allows him to allocate money for the troops’ basic provisions without congressional approval.

Finally, it seems the Pentagon’s war chest won’t go bare until the beginning of June. If Bush vetoes the emergency-spending bill and Congress goes on recess until mid-April, it will be an administrative hassle but not a disaster.

The Feed and Forage Act? Cool.  That would be Section 3732 of the Revised Statutes (41 U.S.C. § 11) - authorizing incurring deficiencies for costs of additional members of the Armed Forces on active duty-beyond the number for which funds are currently provided in DoD appropriations (Title 10 U.S.C.). This authority requires Congressional notification - and does not permit actual expenditures until Congress provides an appropriation of the required funds. But it is not arcane nonsense -

On September 21, 2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld invoked fiscal provisions available under the Feed and Forage Act to handle costs resulting from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft crash in Pennsylvania.

The Department of Defense last invoked the Feed and Forage Act in fiscal 1996 for force protection measures in Saudi Arabia, following the attack on Khobar Towers. While it was invoked at that time, it was not used.

And what of the bills? Kaplan notes they don’t have that much force -

The Senate bill does take out the cleaver. No later than 120 days after the bill’s enactment, the president “shall commence the phrased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq,” with “the goal of redeploying” all combat troops by March 31, 2008.

Even so, there are some loopholes. First, there are those two words I’ve italicized above: The March 2008 deadline is put forth as not the requirement but rather “the goal.”

Second, the bill allows “a limited number” of combat forces to stay “that are essential for the following purposes: (A) Protecting United States and coalition personnel and infrastructure. (B) Training and equipping Iraqi forces. (C) Conducting targeted counter-terrorism operations.”

Force-protection, infrastructure, training, counterterrorism - these missions could justify keeping at least 50,000 American troops in Iraq for a long, long time.

All they do is change the mission back to what it was before the surge - less counterinsurgency combat and more of a support role.

And in any event the Senate bill has a loophole -

The bill allows Bush to keep in Iraq not only troops that perform those three allowed missions but also troops “that are essential for” the purposes of those missions. It would be a stretch to claim that, say, maintaining the counterinsurgency surge is “essential” to train Iraqis or to defeat al-Qaeda; but if Bush were somehow forced to swallow this bill, he could make the argument that all the troops were “essential” for the more modest missions and dare Congress to disagree. It’s a less loopy claim than some of Alberto Gonzales’ parsings of the Constitution.

So even if the president were to give in he could game this. It’s all in how you define things. Yeah, he should lower America’s profile, scale back its mission, turn the bulk of the fighting over to the Iraqis, and get most of our own troops out by March 2008.  But stuff happens.

Kaplan thinks the house bill is more subtle - it links our military commitment to Iraq’s political stability and lays out specific benchmarks that the Iraqi government needs to meet.  In fact, these are the same sort of benchmarks that the president himself has listed in the past. That’s not nice.

Kaplan lists them all. They’re quite specific, and then it gets ugly -

If Bush reports that the Iraqis have not met these benchmarks, or if he doesn’t issue a report at all, then the secretary of defense “shall commence” the redeployment immediately and complete it within 180 days- in other words, by March 30, 2008, the same date as in the Senate bill, except this is a deadline, not a “goal.”

Even then, there are complications, as, just like with that nice teacher, you can get an extension (in this case six months) -

One could argue that the House bill’s distinguishing features - specifying benchmarks and holding out the lure of a six-month extension of the current U.S. troop presence if the Iraqis meet them - are a tease and a ruse. If Iraqi officials can’t disarm the militias or reconcile factions now, an extra six months - followed by a withdrawal - isn’t likely to do the trick. Or if the extension is seen as an incentive, a reward for good governance, doesn’t that suggest that the Iraqis want us to stay? If they meet the benchmarks by October, might that mean the surge is working? If so, should the withdrawal proceed? Maybe the success warrants a reassessment.

None of it matters.  The veto is coming.

So what is the point?  Kaplan tries this -

Is it to put the Democratic Congress on record as favoring a (sort of) withdrawal? Is it a ploy to force Bush and the Republicans to endorse an unpopular war one more time and thus bury themselves in a still deeper hole?

Yes, probably, to some degree.

But the House bill can also be read as a road map that Bush might fruitfully follow. Bush has laid out benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet; they’re pretty much the same as those laid out in the House bill. But Bush didn’t attach any penalties if the Iraqis didn’t meet them - or any rewards if they did. Without any incentives, the Iraqis will be inclined to take the easiest path - and do nothing that requires extraordinary measures or risks.

If Bush were shrewd, he would use the congressional bills themselves as potential penalties. He would thrust the documents in the faces of the Iraqi leaders and say, “This is what will happen if you guys don’t shape up. I don’t want to go this route, but the Democrats are going to make me. I’m not fully in control.”

Yeah, the old god-cop, bad-cop routine - but that too is not going to happen.  The president is not the sort of man who would ever utter “I’m not fully in control.”

Kaplan suggests all that is happening here is congress trying “to shake Bush’s lapels and get him to listen, to do something sensible - if not to end the war (neither bill really seeks to do quite that), at least to offer the Iraqi government some incentives to devise a political settlement and, more important still, to draw the neighboring governments into a diplomatic forum that might keep the conflagration from spreading if Iraq goes up in smoke.”

One suspects the “up in smoke” scenario is what we’ll get.  Everyone is blowing smoke anyway.