strategy

Anthony Cordesman and Robert Shelala II at CSIS have published a new report on the FY13 budget, finding it incredibly lacking.  From the summary:

The analysis finds that a major gap exists between the broad, undefined strategic rhetoric in the new strategy and the budget-driven spending cuts in the FY2013 budget submission. Far too much of the prose in the new strategy has little more depth than the average fortune cookie. There are no clear force plans, procurement plans, personnel plans, or spending plans in most areas. The mission categories and priorities are not adequately explained or justified, and key areas of spending, like the projected expenditure on the Afghan conflict, raise serious questions. Moreover, the steady escalation of personnel and procurement costs also raise question as to whether the projected spending can buy anything like the projected force. 

Kwasi Kwarteng, a Conservative member of British Parliament and author offered an interesting op-ed at the New York Times today:

THE Arab Spring, the threat of Iran as an emerging nuclear power, the continuing violence in Syria and the American reluctance to get involved there have all signaled the weakness, if not the end, of America’s role as a world policeman. President Obama himself said in a speech last year: “America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs.”

America’s position today reminds me of Britain’s situation in 1945. Deep in debt and committed to building its National Health Service and other accouterments of the welfare state, Britain no longer could afford to run an empire.

Read it all here.

Peter J. Munson and Nathan K. Finney argue at Adam Elkus's Rethinking Security blog that there is nothing revolutionary about the anti-access/area denial problem.

Militaries have always had the requirement to be able to project power into areas where access and the freedom to conduct operations were challenged.  The capabilities this concept discusses are nothing new.  The unmatched capabilities of the U.S. military in recent years, however, have created a conceptual environment where the traditional concerns of operational art and strategy – that being how to balance significant risks to the force against the requirement to attain ends determined by political masters – have receded from the institutional memory and even imagination.  These concerns have been replaced by those of postmodern warfare:  first seeking to mitigate every last friendly casualty, second improving the precision and narrowing the effects of our fires in order to avoid civilian casualties – but not at the cost of the first imperative (e.g., a drone delivered low-yield precision-guided weapon over a well-aimed bullet), and third seeking transformational socio-political change rather than domination within the limits of the first two constraints. While these points may be seen as a bit of a caricature or at least an anomaly guided by the experiences of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, it is of critical importance that we delineate whether we expect to operate in an A2/AD environment under similar constraints, presumably driven by limited levels of national commitment, or if we expect that we will forgo limited interventions when faced with such a threat and only contemplate a much higher level of warfare and national investment.

 Here, it is important to remember the A2/AD environments of the past.  We can fast forward past the innovations that brought the Persians to Europe and the Greeks to Asia, that propelled various European powers across the seas and the steppes, and the asymmetric development of firearms and armor to get to some more familiar examples.  Can we truly say that any A2/AD threat faced today or in the mid-term is truly more robust than the aviation, surface, and subsurface patrols that sought to deny American access to the European or Pacific theaters?  Can we say that today’s cyber challenges present a more daunting task than crossing the open ocean the air or on the sea with only a wet compass and perhaps celestial navigation? Was the island-hopping campaign of the Pacific or the assault on Normandy any less daunting of an A2/AD challenge both from the loss of aircraft carriers and troop ships in the blue water to the incomprehensibly deadly fire at the water line?  Are distributed operations with the aid of advanced communications and navigation more challenging than the maneuver of massive sea-landed, aviation, and airborne forces based almost solely on a single plan?  Finally, are current and prospective threat weapons any more asymmetric or smart than the Kamikaze planes that targeted ships in the Pacific or the fanatical Nazi storm troopers that defended the beachheads of Europe? 

There is more at Elkus's blog.

CSIS's Anthony Cordesman argues that the strategy embarked upon by Gen Stanley McChrystal is now dead and that the U.S. and its allies must construct and resource a strategy to transition to an Afghan "muddle through" that doesn't greatly jeopardize U.S. interests.  While I'm not sure that there has ever been a strategy in Afghanistan, or how to state it, Cordesman argues that four threats have been killing any such strategy from the beginning. (h/t Nathan Finney)

The key reasons shaping uncertainty as to whether the mission could be accomplished—whether it would be possible to create an Afghanistan that could largely stand on its own and be free of any major enclaves of terrorists or violent extremists—went far beyond the problems created by the insurgents.

It was clear that there were four roughly equal threats to success, of which the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar were only the first. The second was the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government. The third was the role of Pakistan and its tolerance and support of insurgent sanctuaries. The fourth was the United States and its allies.

I highly recommend that you also see Jim Sleeper's "How the Debacle in Afghanistan Disgraced its Cheerleaders" at the Huffington Post, h/t anonymous you know who you are.