Here is the latest edition of my column at Foreign Policy:
Topics include:
1) Bin Laden's death will change Washington -- and Pakistan won't like it
2) Are the Navy's big aircraft carriers too risky?
Bin Laden's death will change Washington -- and Pakistan won't like it
The day after U.S. special operations forces dramatically raided Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan seemed to invite an investigation into whether elements of the Pakistani government were complicit in sheltering bin Laden. During a briefing, Brennan asserted, "I think it's inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time. I am not going to speculate about what type of support he might have had on an official basis inside of Pakistan ... I think people are raising a number of questions, and understandably so."
But a day later, the administration seemed more eager to limit the damage the raid might cause to its relationship with Islamabad. The Pentagon and the Pakistani military issued a joint statement reaffirming their cooperation against terrorism. And according to the Wall Street Journal, senior administration officials urged restraint in blaming Pakistan's leaders for the embarrassing presence of bin Laden and his family within a few hundred meters of Pakistan's army academy and in the same neighborhood as many retired army officers.
From this perspective, the bin Laden raid is now a matter for historians to ponder: serious policymakers on both sides should focus on the future and on those practical interests shared by the United States and Pakistan. From this point of view, the raid didn't change the interests each side seeks or the leverage each side can deploy against the other and the United States still needs Pakistan's cooperation against terror networks that threaten the West. The U.S. also needs Pakistani support to move supply convoys through Pakistan to its forward operating bases in Afghanistan. For its part, Islamabad still seeks to maintain its connections to the West, to retain its diplomatic options, and to receive financial assistance from Washington and elsewhere. The death of bin Laden hasn't changed any of these facts.
This view may be correct for now but it is not likely to hold. First, with the bin Laden raid such a spectacular success, Obama will likely come under increasing pressure to repeat its success. Previous U.S. direct action incursions into Pakistan were met with harsh reactions from Islamabad, including the temporary shutdown of the supply pipeline through the Khyber Pass. But with the raid's success and the now nearly universal assumption that the Pakistani government is not a trustworthy partner, there will be growing political pressure inside the United States for Obama to treat Pakistan as an "open range" for military operations against terrorist targets.
Second, political pressure will mount on Obama to wind down the war in Afghanistan, something that the president seems —to accommodate. Bin Laden's death will deliver finality to many in the U.S. electorate. The sense of an end to the 9/11 story will clash with calls to continue the costly counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan's villages. Should Obama accede to an accelerated departure from Afghanistan, it would be another demonstration that the "post-Gates" era has arrived, a point my FP colleague Peter Feaver mentioned this week.
The more forces the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, the more leverage it gains over Pakistan; fewer forces in Afghanistan mean less reliance on the supply line through Pakistan. The bin Laden raid set a precedent for U.S. ground operations inside Pakistan, which Obama will now come under increasing pressure to repeat. It is true that the bin Laden raid didn't change for now the fundamental interests and leverage in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. But the raid did set in motion political forces inside the United States that won't please Pakistan.
Are the Navy's big aircraft carriers too risky?
In my March 18 column, I discussed how China's rapidly growing inventories of ballistic and cruise missiles will threaten the existing U.S. defense strategy in the western Pacific. The latest issue of Proceedings, the journal of the United States Naval Institute, contained an article written by two Pentagon strategists that argued for the gradual phasing out of the Navy's large aircraft carrier fleet. The arguments against the supercarriers go back decades and regularly recur, especially when money gets tight. But this time, the authors argue, the missile threat is too serious to ignore. They argue for a new fleet design. And in doing so, they expose how some of the other defense-cut proposals recently floated in Washington were not thought through.
In "Twilight of the $UPERfluous Carrier," Navy Captain Henry Hendrix and retired Marine Lt. Col. J. Noel Williams explain why the growing anti-ship missile threat makes it too risky for the Navy to continue to rely on a handful of large aircraft carriers to control the sea and project power ashore. Hendrix and Williams instead recommend distributing naval air power over a larger number of smaller carriers which would reduce risk and complicate an adversary's planning. The authors call for retaining the current fleet of large carriers but not building any more. The existing carriers would gradually phase out over the next 50 years. To replace them, the authors recommend expanding purchases of an amphibious assault ship currently being produced for the Marine Corps. This ship is an aircraft carrier about half the size of the Navy's largest carriers, but at one-third the cost.
But in order to make the Hendrix and Williams proposal work, the Pentagon would have to make its full planned purchase of the troubled Marine Corps version of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35B, which does not need the large carrier's catapults to get into the air. The F-35B has been a favorite target lately of defense reformers and those hoping to make further cuts to the defense budget. Hendrix and Williams also foresee the Navy's future unmanned drone jets operating from the small carrier, as well as the full range of helicopters, Marines, special forces personnel, and more.
In addition to reducing risk and complicating an adversary's planning, employing a much larger fleet of small carriers would make it easier for the United States to maintain a forward presence, show the flag, engage with foreign partners, and deter conflicts. The small carriers can also perform a much greater variety of missions than can the large carriers. In the meantime, over the next 50 years the large aircraft carriers would transition to a mobile reserve, for contingencies requiring heavy power projection capability.
The Hendrix and Williams proposal is a sharp contrast to the other recently released defense reform proposals. Proposals from the president's Fiscal Commission, the Dominici-Rivlin panel, and Gordon Adams at the Stimson Center all go in the opposite direction. They would cancel the F-35B but apparently retain the Navy's plans for maintaining indefinitely its fleet of large aircraft carriers. The result of these plans would be the concentration of all of the Navy and Marine Corps strike aircraft at sea on a handful of increasingly vulnerable ships.
The other plans targeted the F-35, the Osprey aircraft, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and other programs that have been hobbled with cost overruns. By comparison, the Navy's large aircraft carrier program seems much less troubled. But picking program winners and losers by these criteria and not in the context of mission requirements, adversary capabilities, and combat risk could be a recipe for disaster when contractor efficiency is disconnected from combat requirements. Hendrix and Williams have proposed a fleet design with the future battlefield in mind. How the defense contractors measure up delivering that fleet, they leave to others.
Comments
Omar & Madhu:
You guys pretty much say it all. The situation is very sad and may be beyond hope.
There are so many uncertainties. The anti-Taliban forces may not be so bad as they were before years or our training. They may not be the pushovers GHQ probably expects them to be once we bug out. Robert C. Jones may be right when he says if we aren't there it may stimulate them, but I don't think it will stimulate them to compromise.
Mr. Haddick mentions the possibility of more raids into Pakistan. I still suspect the ISI gave up OBL and knew we were coming. If we pull more raids and get over confident and don't clear it with the ISI, we might see Americans fighting Pak Army troops in Pakistan, Blackhawk Down in North Wazistan only you couldn't tell whose F-16s were whose.
Madhu, I think one of the reasons the South Asia experts can't think of anything new is they won't think of anything new. They won't because if they did they would have to admit that they been had, for years they been had, by some brown skinned guys in Pindi who never ever could have been admitted to an Ivy League school. Better for the world to end than the anointed ones admit to being wrong. Emotion can be a very strong motivation.
Zenpundit and Pundita both point to the terrorism trial starting in Chicago next Monday the 16th. Mr. Headley is supposed to testify. I wonder if that will upset some of our betters inside the beltway.
Geesh I wish we could do something to stop this.
I think a lot of the official statements are false on all sides, and it is likely that the US does not want to push Pakistan too far and will be happy to get a face-saving deal in Afghanistan in exchange for not making a fuss about ISI support for Bin Laden (never mind the mumbai terrorists, who have never been too high on America's hitlist).
Of course, my view is that this "success" of the deep state is actually worse for Pakistanis than failure. It means they will succeed in keeping their "good jihadis" for a few more years but eventually the good jihadis will cause problems just like the bad jihadis. One day, the state has to give up its jihadi dream very completely or it will die in flames. If America wont make them do it, then maybe one day China will, or India and Pakistan will fight it out and depopulate the overcrowded subcontinent. THAT is the real issue. GHQ thinks its achieving some great victory by withstanding American pressure and holding on to dear Hafiz Saeed and dear Uncle Haqqani, but that whole notion is a recipe for endless war.....not that our saying so makes any difference.
About the US, I think US financial support will wind down one day because too many Americans will get fed up. But after a few days of optimism, I think its not a problem the US can solve.
How disappointing the Sunday morning talkshows and punditry have generally been (you excepted, Mr. Haddick).
They really know how to miss the main point. They really cannot follow a story to its logical conclusion without getting lost in the weeds of domestic partisanship.
The point isn't complicity or duplicity or who knew what or when or how.
The point is that the state of Pakistan grows jihadis and is set up to do just that. The whole place is set up to conduct irregular warfare against its neighbors in order to keep the elite in power and to support its delusions of grandeur - we will be the spoke around which the South Asian wheel revolves!
It would be so nice if the national security reporter types would keep up on the main points:
1. We are going back to our status quo relationship once this all dies down and we extract our troops from Afghanistan.
2. Our status quo relationship has proved dangerous to the world at large.
3. The SA policy community is conceptually and intellectually stuck and doesn't know what to do so it offers the same policies that have been tried in the past and to no avail. Else, why are we where we are today?
@ carl and omar -
It's as if a "spell" has been broken and the unspoken finally spoken.
I wrote the following elsewhere:
<blockquote>I dont know about Australia, but the United States has had every possible type of diplomatic and military relationship with Pakistan - weve developed and trained parts of its military (and this from the beginning. The UK, too.), stuffed it to the gills with military aid, provided money intended for education of its civilian population which was then squandered and looted, prevented India from retaliating against terror attacks emanating from the region, attempted to cut aid during the time of the Pressler Amendment, and "walked away" from Pakistan during the 90s:</blockquote>
And the trends have continued in one direction over sixty odd years. We might try admitting the truth to ourselves.
We in the West thought we could handle our own "pet" Islamabad Army over the years the way the Pak Army/ISI thought they could handle their own particular "non-state" actors.
They received intellectual cover for it from a generation of Western South Asia analysts and policy makers excessively influenced by its <em>own</em> relations with Islamabad.
Dance with the jihadi tiger and you get bitten. Or rather, the people you mean to protect get eaten alive.
The infection manifested itself within our own institutions in thinking (go read various think tank archives or the American National Security Archives or the archives of certain American military journals) that we could "handle" the moderates and secular types.
We don't really know who we are dealing with and we don't really know if our particular favorites are protecting the nuclear arsenal. How could we possibly know? With any surety? And the crazy thing is that the things we in the West do to "secure" the arsenal also creates instability.
Instability and stability at the same time. Security and insecurity at the same time. Both together, like waves and particles in light.
Big conceptual error over decades of SA policy: as long as you point the non-state actors at your neighbors and away from us, we'll ignore the whole thing.
That's my read on it, at any rate.
Dunno if I'm right. Hope I'm wrong.
I've read that big ships are more survivable than smaller ships, so if you went with LHAs you'd have more ships that were less capable and easier to sink. But on the other hand if you get into a fight like this an active production line will be needed in order to replace the ships sunk. LHAs might be easier to produce in the numbers needed. This is not an easy problem. It would be good to realize that probably a lot of ships will be destroyed along with entire crews. We haven't had to face that in almost 70 years.
The softer but more decisive consideration is not who has the most of what kind of toys; but ultimately, who is better trained and lead; who thinks better prior to, during, and after combat.
I'm not advocating arrogance or under-estimating the Chinese -- we've paid for that before. Further, it is no small feat that the Chinese have technological achievements few others have duplicated (man in space, even with borrowed Russian technology).
However, the American way of war is unique. We should capitalize on our strengths; and particularly, our ability to train for war in a "workmanship" mode (John Keegan).
The short sentence here is this: Even though the assets of both sides would be greater with anti-ship missiles, the winner will be whoever fights the war better.
Of the two consequences you mention in your first section, ie. greater pressure on the Administration to repeat commando strikes in Pakistan, and less pressure on us to remain in Afghanistan, I wonder if the first is as likely as the second. The possible targets in Pakistan are of lesser importance than Bin Laden, and if each new strike is as deep into Pakistan as the recent one, the risk of something going wrong will rise.
I wonder if instead we will see more openly conducted short-range cross-border incursions, such as we saw in Cambodia and Laos after 1970 as we pulled out of Vietnam. These might be a way partially to offset the steady drawdown in our numbers on the Afghan side of the border until we are effectively gone. The Pakistanis could still object but if they see us drawing down our forces in Afghanistan they may not object too strongly.
Regarding your second section on the fleet, the problem is that our anti-missile defenses do not seem likely to protect our carriers against a very large missile salvo at short range. For us to move from a dozen large carriers to several dozen smaller ones may not be enough of an offset given the cost of even small carriers compared to the cost to China of simply adding to its supply of missiles.
However, both sides will have anti-ship missiles, and China will have the same difficulty projecting surface seapower that we will have doing so. The likelihood is that we will see a loss of US ability to operate at close range to China, but China will be limited as well in its ability to project seapower beyond this range. China will then see an effective limit to its maritime power as a result of its own action in making anti-ship missiles a more decisive factor in naval warfare.
The Marine Corps' programs are too fancy, "transformational," and expensive for our own good. The train wreck will come when it is time to replace all of these transformational programs at the same time in about 20 years. Every Marine aviation platform is undergoing transition today. We are going to fly the wings off of these expensive platforms (like we are doing to the FA-18 today) doing low-yield multisensor imagery reconaissance/CAS missions that could be done with UAVs or something like a rewinged/engined OV-10. The one size fits all paradigm for our aviation force is incredibly wasteful, especially during these times. We are spending capital we will need down the road. In this vein, I just don't see the proposal to up the amphib force and decrease the carrier force as having any chance of becoming reality, both for political reasons and the amount of money it would take to lay down these new hulls. The Dong Feng 21D threat is new and probably not nearly fully developed, but it is something we need to be thinking about. The way to counter it is not to downsize from carriers we can't sacrifice to amphibs we can't really sacrifice either. The answer is to come up with different solutions, including armed UAS's we can fly off of distributed land and sea bases and sacrifice. We also need to realize that the kamikaze was a dire and asymmetric threat that we accepted because our national interests demanded it. I discussed these issues in the Marine Corps Gazette in an online article here: http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/back-to-our-roots
I think you are right and you get the credit for being one of the first American analysts to say this (in your piece from Monday). I think a lot of other people have not had this sink in yet.
Beyond the mechanics you point out, there is the matter of what happens when thousands or millions of people begin to think differently. Everything that happens in the world is ultimately due to human beings thinking something through and doing something about it. The change here will take time to work itself through the system, but I dont think GHQ has fully grasped their changed position. I am not claiming clairvoyance, just that the shortcut to figuring out what may happen is to ignore the details and see what the long-term pressures are. The long-term pressure here is that the insane jihadism developed in Pakistan and Afghanistan under official patronage 30 years ago is not compatible with coexistence with others on this planet. One way or the other, it was always going to run into trouble. This happens to be a bigger milestone on that road...