Counterpunch: The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

February 3, 2010

The New QDR

The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney02032010.html

Monday, February 1, 2010, was a day that should live in budgetary infamy. The Defense Department released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and its accompanying Fiscal Year 2011 budget request, which is the first year of the Fiscal Year 2011-2015 five year plan (2011-2015 FYDP). These documents are available on the internet and can be downloaded in PDF format here: QDR and the FY 2011 budget.

Even by the dismal intellectual standards of Pentagon bureaucracy, the QDR and the FY 2011 budget, taken together, establish a new standard of analytical vacuity, psychological denial, and just plane meaningless drivel. I will keep this short by using just one important case to prove my allegation. Judge for yourself if it is necessary and sufficient to make the point.

First, I must bore you with a little background: The Pentagon has been producing FYDPs since 1962. But these FYDPs have been repeatedly criticized for producing defense budgets that were disconnected from the national military strategy -- and because the dollar allocations made in any budget determine what any government's policy really is, the critique was logically equivalent to saying there was no strategy. The congressional legislation in the mid 1990s that established the QDR was only the most recent attempt to deal with this long standing criticism. The aim of that legislation was to require the Pentagon to lay out an intellectual framework for matching its military strategy and ambitions to the resource constraints shaping those ambitions, especially budgetary constraints, but also constraints relating to people, the limitations imposed by available technologies, etc.

The new FY 2011 budget and its accompanying FYDP, therefore, are supposed to attach budgetary and programmatic meat to the strategic skeleton that is the QDR, both of which were completed at the same time and made public on 1 February -- itself a somewhat illogical sequence, given that one is supposed to precede the other. In theory, these documents should permit an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses implicit in the matchup between resources and strategy. Therefore, these documents should enable the Secretary of Defense to send the President and the Congress a comprehensive set of priorities, opportunity costs, and risks associated with his strategic plan. This information would then become the grist for a rational national debate by linking strategic considerations to the inevitable compromises made in the sausage making factory that is Congress. Moreover, as this is President Obama's first budget, and because it represents $700+ billion that Mr. Obama just put off limits in the coming national debate over whether or how to shrink the federal deficit, it was crucially important for the Pentagon to get the QDR and the accompanying FY 2011-2015 FYDP right in a logically consistent and transparent manner.

If we apply this standard to the Pentagon's recently completed handiwork, only one conclusion is possible: the Pentagon flunked the test by being intellectually absent without leave.

One example is sufficient to prove this point. For the past 20 years or so, mainstream and defense related press outlets have inundated the American public with horror stories about the Pentagon's aging force structure and with stories about the Pentagon's unauditable budget shambles -- the two are intertwined. And over the last 10 years or so the public has been inundated by stories describing how that force structure is being being worn out by the high operating tempos of our never ending wars and interventions, yet another dimension of the same problem. In fact, I first started documenting this aging trend in the early 1980s in a series of analytical studies, some classified, but most unclassified, and it has gotten worse and more intractable each year.

There is simply no question that the weapons in our force structure inventories have been getting older on average at an alarming rate. The fundamental reason for the aging trend is that the unit costs of buying and operating new weapons grow faster than defense budgets grow, even when budgets grow at unprecedented rates, as they have since the mid-1990s, and consequently, as weapons grow older over time, they become more expensive to operate, which exacerbates the growth in operating costs even further, and the rising costs eventually forces decision makers to retire the oldest weapons without replacement, thereby shrinking the size of the force structure. It is beyond dispute that today the Pentagon is fielding the smallest and, on average, the oldest force structure since the end of WWII, yet it is paying more for that force structure, even after adjusting for the effects of inflation, than at any time since the end of WWII.

Central to this pathological death spiral is the unquestionable fact that the Pentagon's financial management system can not keep track of its actual expenditures or how the predicted expenditures in its FYDP will unfold over over time. The chaos in the accounting system provides the intellectual "grease" to lubricate the engine driving narrow bureaucratic agendas that are causing the force structure meltdown. Senior decision makers can not possibly understand the trade offs they are really making when they put together a budget, assuming they wanted to, which is also in doubt. The accounting problem has been identified in tens, if not hundreds, of reports produced by the General Accounting Office (the auditing arm of Congress) and the Defense Department's own Inspector General. I described how the budget shambles impacted the strategic decision making problem in my last testimony to Congress in June 2002.

The problem of unilateral disarmament at ever higher cost (i.e., the interaction of weapons cost growth greater than budget growth, aging and shrinking forces, and corrupt accounting system that makes it impossible to sort our corrective strategies) is well established, and thanks to the largess of Mad King George, should now be beyond dispute.

So, I have a test for you, dear reader: Download the QDR and the FY2011 budget from the links in the first paragraph. The are formated in searchable PDF file format. Do word and phrase searches on words like aging, age, "weapons aging," accounting, audit, bookkeeping, or anything else you can think of that might related to the problems described above, and determine for yourself the extent to which these problems are addressed. (eg., a search in the budget of "audit" will take you to page 7-34, among others, where you will find that DoD set a goal of reaching 100% auditability for its assets and liabilities in the year 2017, but the last column shows that the indicator of progress made toward that goal in FY 2010 was deleted at the request of the Comptroller, who happens to be the chief financial officer of DoD!)

Alternatively, you could make the same kind of determination by reading the entire text of each, but before you do so, I recommend you buy a couple of boxes of No Doz, so you can keep awake. Either way, you will end up with the same self evident conclusion.

Some farm defenders might say, we must go forward with this protected monstrosity, because we are at war.

That is a false choice -- President Obama could freeze the core budget at this year's level, just like he is doing for the rest of the government. He could tell the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more reasonable. If he chooses to do this, he should task the Pentagon with a massive crash program to clean up the bookkeeping shambles as job 1, rather than waiting until 2017. At the same time, Obama could then ask Congress to pay for his wars on a "pay as you go" basis, which Congress and the Pentagon have been doing for years, in any case, via supplemental appropriations.

Readers interested in a more details on one way we might go about cleaning out the Pentagon's Augean Stables can read my statement to Congress from the aforementioned link.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Counterpunch: Turning Sun Tzu on His Head

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

Weekend Edition
January 29 - 31, 2010

The Eikenberry Cables and the Escalation in Afghanistan

Turning Sun Tzu on His Head

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney01292010.html

In the opening line of Book 1 of Sun Tzu's classic, The Art of War (circa 400 BC), the first treatise ever written on the subject, the Chinese master said,"War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life and death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied." He then goes on to describe a systematic method for assembling the information needed to make a rational decision to go to war.

Today, in Pentagonese, we would call his method a "net assessment," that is to say Sun Tzu described a very thoughtful way to perform a comparative analysis of one's own strengths and weaknesses with those of the adversary. Sun Tzu's strategic outlook is amazingly relevant to contemporary circumstances; indeed, it is timeless, and I submit it provides the gold standard for for evaluating our own efforts to grapple with the question of going to war or to escalate a war -- basically, his advice was simple: know your enemy and know yourself before plunging into war.

When the wisdom of Sun Tzu's gold standard is compared to the crude domestic political machinations used to steamroller President Obama into escalating the war in Afghanistan, a horrifying picture emerges at the most basic of level decision making. The public debate concentrated on only one side of that net assessment -- the side advocating escalation, and even the argument for that side was conceptually flawed in that it did not examine its own strengths and weaknesses.

The recently leaked cables by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry bring this imbalance into sharp relief. Eikenberry raised some thoughtful objections to the McChrystal/Petraeus/Gates/Clinton escalation plan from the perspective of its limitations on "knowing ourselves" (US, Karzai government, and the Afghan security forces). He did not really address the strengths and weaknesses on other side of the net assessment--i.e., those of our adversaries. But his analysis is damning enough. Eikenberry's objections were sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in secret cables. Presumably President Obama studied them prior to his decision to accede to the escalation pressures. Eikenberry's analyses are both an interesting and important counterpoints to what I still believe was an ill advised decision.

Bear in mind, as far as public awareness is concerned, the McChrystal plan, which was also secret, was leaked in redacted form to the Washington Post well before Mr. Obama caved into the domestic political pressures for escalation -- in fact, that leak was part of a carefully orchestrated public political steamroller to pressure Mr. Obama to accede to the escalation. Yet McChrystal's escalation plan was by no means a self evident winner. In fact, it was conceptually flawed in its own terms -- -- namely that McChrystal failed to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the Afghan National Security Forces, yet his whole strategy depended depended on a rapid increase in the effectiveness of those forces. My discussion of this flaw, as well as the raw political character of the escalation steamroller, can found here, here, and here. In short, there is very little evidence that the proponents of escalation on our side did the kind of systematic analysis advocated by Sun Tzu to really "know ourselves," let alone know the enemy.

On the other hand, Amb. Eikenberry's thoughtful objections to that escalation plan at least provided some first order information to redress one side of this conceptual disaster. While his objections were reported in very general terms prior to the escalation decision, they were not leaked to the press (NYT) until well after Mr. Obama's decision. So, given the asymmetric leaking tactics in the bureaucratic war, the net result was that the public and the Congress were presented with a one-sided picture of the debate over a vital question of state -- and this lopsided picture was then pounded into the people, the Congress, and the President by the thumping echo chamber of hysterical warmongers in the mainstream electronic media and talk radio.

So, I pose a question: Read the Eikenberry cables and then ask yourself whether we the people and our representatives in Congress would have had a more constructive political debate over this most vital of questions if the details of Ambassador Eikenberry's objections were known and understood to the same extent as the details of the escalation plan were understood prior to Mr. Obama's decision.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Counterpunch:The Afghan War Question

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

November 12, 2009

Obama and the Triumph of the Will

The Afghan War Question

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/11/12/the-afghan-war-question/

Marmaris, Turkey.

In the opening lines of the oldest treatise on the conduct of war, Sun Tzu said that the question of war is vital to the state, and therefore, it is imperative to study it. This timeless advice has been been ignored repeatedly by the United States since the end of WWII. The inevitable result has been an insensible rise of war mongering, fueled by arrogance and ignorance, culminating in the chaotic spectacle now enveloping the Afghan War Question in Washington.

The intellectual content of the debate over whether or how much to escalate our forces in Afghanistan has degenerated into formless ranting by all sides. The content of this debate is not conditioned by a clear definition of military success. Nor is it conditioned by a definition of a desired political endstate. When asked how he would define victory, the State Department's special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, arrogantly summed up the collective state of mind by saying pithily, "we will know it when we see it." With thinking like this, it should not be surprising that can be no definition of an exit strategy or a timeline for ending a war we are admittedly losing, even though that war is now in its ninth year. By the way, Sun Tau also advised to avoid protracted war, and the only protracted shooting war we ever won was the American Revolution, in which we were the insurgents.

Yet, in the middle of the worst domestic economic crisis since the 1930s, President Obama appears to be on the verge of caving in to the irrational pressures for throwing more troops and money into the bottomless pit of Afghanistan. How did the Afghan escalation question degenerate into such a ridiculously chaotic state?

Its immediate antecedents are quite clear.

At the center of this debate is, or should be, the strategic plan submitted to President Obama in August by the theater commander General Stanley McChrystal. That plan's centerpiece is to provide security for the Afghan people by accelerating the training and expansion of the Afghan Army and Police Forces (ANSF). To buy time for this expansion, McChrystal said a surge in US forces of 40,000 is needed, an estimate, according to subsequent reports, that may have been expanded to as many as 80,000 troops, a number the US would not be able to field and sustain without a reinstitution of the draft. McChrystal or one his war mongering allies in the Pentagon or in the right wing of the Republican Party immediately increased the beating of the war drums by leaking a carefully "redacted" version of his "secret" recommendations to the most obliging courtier of the permanent Washington apparat, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. By not attempting to find and discipline those responsible for a blatantly insubordinate act aimed at pre-empting his decision-making prerogatives, President Obama, the constitutionally designated commander-in-chief, telegraphed pusillanimity to the proponents of escalation, and thus set the tone for subsequent events.

In the best of circumstances, building an effective military force from scratch takes a long time. History has shown repeatedly that, absent a well trained reserve force and a highly trained active duty officer and NCO corps, it is impossible to rapidly expand the active duty forces of any military organization without seriously degrading its recruiting and training standards. This is true even when one is expanding it from the base of a competent core force, which is certainly not the case in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in September, McChrystal's plan was fatally flawed, because it contained no systematic evaluation outlining the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of the Afghan forces he wants to double in size over a very short period.

In normal circumstances, such a failure of analysis would have been a sloppy, irresponsible omission. In this particular case, the omission was made even more outrageous for at least two reasons: First, building a national army that puts loyalty to the state ahead of tribe, clan, and family in Afghanistan's ancient clan based vendetta culture would be, in the most ideal of circumstances, a highly dubious proposition, because its goal would go against the traditional perquisites implicit in an ancient, highly-evolved culture. At the very least, this challenge ought to have been subjected to the closest anthropological and historical analysis. Second, conditions are hardly ideal. Indeed, it is common knowledge that the current Afghan security forces are already riven by corruption, the conflicted loyalties of warlordism, drug trafficking and murderous criminality, not to mention the central fact that Afghanistan's Pashtun plurality, whose alienated hearts and minds are crucial to the success of any counterinsurgency strategy, is grossly underrepresented in the army and police forces.

In short, McChrystal's cavalier portrayal of the Afghan National Security Forces at the center of his plan ought to have been a show stopper. Moreover, the fact that it was leaked by a politically motivated military officer or a civilian powerbroker to increase pressure on the President for its approval ought have resulted visible discipline. But of course, the huge hole in McChrystal's plan was ignored and is now forgotten. No one was hung for crass insubordination. So, it should not be surprising that the Afghan War Question devolved into an evermore formless debate.

A recent AP report by Ben Feller and Anne Gearan introduces two interesting points that will add to the confusion:

Rather than lowering the boom and acting as if it was controlling the events it should be controlling, the White House is now retaliating by leaking like a sieve. Unnamed officials now tell us that Obama senses (correctly) that he is being railroaded and, in secret diplomatic cables, Ambassador Eikenbury recently injected his objections to the pervasive corruption infecting the government of Hamid Karzai. Obama, reportedly, is using Eikenbury's objections as leverage to slow down deliberations and to justify his demand for a timetable laying out how long a continued US presence will be needed.

On the other hand, the report, in what is no doubt a trial balloon, says Obama is leaning toward a "compromise" position of authorizing an increase of 30,000 troops, including three Army brigades and an unspecified USMC contingent. Included in this "compromise" head count of 30,000, however, would be an authorization for the bloated overhead of a huge new headquarters housing 7,000 or more troops. Such a headquarters will no doubt necessitate a huge outlay in construction dollars to house it, a quantum increase in the thru-put of logistics pipelines, and a large increase in the number of field grade and general officers to man it. Therefore, this approval also implies an approval for an increase in the size of and vested interests in an open-ended commitment.

President Obama has been accused of dithering by delaying his decision to escalate, but his politically costly purchase of time is not serving to bring clarity to the debate. He has allowed the huge hole in McChrystal's incompetent plan to remain unaddressed, except perhaps obliquely by Ambassador Eikenbury, and to metastasize into a festering state of confusion. This confusion has opened the door to the displacement of rationality by emotion.

Not surprisingly, given the growing tolerance for irrationality in Versailles on the Potomac, the war mongering proponents of immediate escalation are becoming increasingly hysterical. If the mindless mutterings by the likes David Brooks (New York Times) and Michael Gerson (Washington Post) are representative, the proponents of escalation have now reduced themselves to emulating the irrational exhortations made by Adolf Hitler, from the depths of his Fuhrer Bunker cut off from reality, about victory being merely a question of willpower.

This kind of lunatic ranting should not be surprising, because as my good friend Werther recently explained, the triumph of the will over the intellect is an example of the Right Wing's historic preference for emotion over reason. This kind of ranting also sets the stage for a future stab in the back argument that blames Obama for losing what was in reality a colossal Bush screw up.

Of course, the histrionics of Brooks and Gerson do not come close to rivaling the emotive power of the torchlight Nuremberg parades immortalized by Leni Reifenstahl in her artistic classic, "The Triumph of the Will." But the feebleness of their imitation makes it all the more pathetic when a man as intelligent as Barack Obama, a gifted speaker who has all the advantages of the bully pulpit together with the awesome status of commander-in-chief, lacks the moral courage to lift his nation out of their kind of darkness into light of reason.

Counterpunch: Should Obama Escalate the War in Afghanistan?

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

A Thought Experiment

Should Obama Escalate the War in Afghanistan?

By CHUCK SPINNEY

Counterpunch

30 July 2008

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney07302008.html

In a recent essay, entitled “Obama’s Politics of Change: Afghanistan & Gore’s Transformative Vision,” I noted in respect to the early phase of our war against the Taliban that --

“In the fall of 2001, intel reports said there were between 40-60,000 Taliban, but when we quickly “defeated” them, the intel folks could only account for 6-8000 captured, wounded or killed. Nevertheless, the Pentagon brass and Bush quickly declared victory, even though it was clear at the time that the Taliban headed for the hills in classical guerrilla/Sun Tzu fashion -- when faced with superior force, disperse! That’s a no-brainer in some circles but not those inside the Beltway. Now we are saying the Taliban are “regrouping” when is not clear they ever degrouped.”

Some people objected to my characterization of of the Afghan War as being a loser, saying the Afghan war is a morally good that must be prosecuted to a victorious end. While tautological reasoning may be comforting, particularly when it is other people’s blood that is being spilt, it is important to ask oneself how a victory might be achieved. Is this merely a question of throwing more troops and bombs at at the problem, or is there more to it than that?

This article references two documents which may help the committed escalator determine whether it is a good idea to ramp up our efforts in Afghanistan with more troops, more military force, more “precision” bombing, which means more collateral damage, including more innocent civilian deaths, and is likely to breed more resentment, and more radicalization. Or whether the inept Mr. Bush and his neocon henchmen have created the conditions for another classical guerrilla war in Afghanistan, not unlike that created by the Soviets in the early 1980s which created misery for them in the late 1980s.

In this regard, readers would do well to remember that (1) Soviets had an easy ride for the first few years, while the Afghan guerrillas leaned how to fight them through a process of trial and error; and (2), that the Soviets reached a point where it became clear that pouring in more Soviet troops and increasing the firepower created more problems than it solved. Which begs the question: Is escalating the war in Afghanistan becoming a yawning trap, into which Mr. Obama and the Democrats seem eager to plunge?

At the heart of this question is the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, specifically the question of whether or not it has mutated into something that is more akin to a classical guerrilla war as opposed to being part of a Fourth Generation War against al Quaeda. The two attachments below may help the reader to appreciate the different dimensions of this consideration.

A recent report in Newseek entitled “The Taliban’s Baghdad Strategy,” offerss a well-informed description of the Taliban’s approach to the conflict in Afghanistan. It describes how the Taliban are pursuing a strategy to systematically undermine the authority of the government of Mr Karsai, a man who, it should be remembered, the West, particularly the United States, put into place as the President of Afghanistan, and who, according to some reports, might be receiving financial support from Pakistan’s rival India. Is this Taliban strategy something new and peculiar to the so-called Global War on Terror -- a war that Mr. Bush, the Pentagon, and now apparently many of Obama’s defense advisors, seem to think they can prosecute successfully by relying on more boots on the ground coupled to more “precision firepower?”

Or is the Afghan War more in the nature of a modern guerrilla war, wherein a government established and propped up by unwanted outsiders with their own agendas usually becomes a critical losing vulnerability?

I have also attached below portions of a briefing that may help some of us to understand these latter questions. It contains three slides #91, #92, & #108 from the late Colonel John R. Boyd’s legendary briefing of the philosophy and conduct of war, Patterns of Conflict, which was written well before the Taliban even existed. Boyd’s aim in Patterns of Conflict was to synthesize a unified understanding of the fundamental nature conflict by examining the history regular and irregular war. Boyd was not a warmonger, but he recognized war is often unavoidable, and his aim was to understand it in a way that it could be prosecuted successfully at the lowest possible cost to society and in a way that reduced the possibility of future conflict. The three slides of his 193-slide briefing describe part of his understanding of the nature of modern guerrilla warfare (i.e., #91 & #92) as well as the nature of a successful counter guerrilla operations (i.e., #108). I picked them because they are the most pertinent to the simple exercise described below.

I want readers to perform a little thought experiment by comparing the information in Newsweek article to that in Boyd’s Boyd’s generic observations about the conduct of a guerrilla campaign in Slides #91 and #92. If you agree that the information in the Newsweek report mesh at least enough with the ideas in these slides to warrant further thinking, then ask yourself if Mr. Obama and the Democrats, together with their Afghan and Nato allies and the American public are willing and capable of undertaking the kind of counter-guerrilla campaign that meets ALL of the conditions of Boyd’s Slide #108?

And if the answer is NO in either of these two steps, maybe it is time for the US to leave. BUT if you still want to escalate the war and the hemorrhage of blood and treasure in Afghanistan, then you owe it to yourself to come up with some more realistic ideas than those in Slide #108 about how to successfully escalate this war. Simply saying it is a GOOD war may be comforting but it is not enough. Simply saying it is a question of WILL may work as a substitute for thought, but it is no strategy. If staying the course is your choice, then what is needed is a strategy that will work in the real world.

There is one point in this simple exercise that serious readers ought to bear in mind: While these three slides give the essential gist of Boyd’s understanding of the guerrilla warfare, he would be the first to warn that one must be very careful not to think of them as an isolated modules or checklists -- they exist in a larger strategic and grand strategic fabric, but I think they are sufficient to get this thought experiment going, at least as a first cut. The venturesome, particularly those who answered NO to the comparisons of this thought experiment, can download Patterns of Conflict in its entirety here.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney (born 1945, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio) is an American former military analyst for the Pentagon who became famous in the early 1980s for what became known as the “Spinney Report”, criticizing what he described as the reckless pursuit of costly complex weapon systems by the Pentagon, with disregard to budgetary consequences. Despite attempts by the his superiors to bury the controversial report, it eventually was exposed during a United States Senate Budget Committee on Defense hearing, which though scheduled to go unnoticed, made the cover of Time Magazine March 7, 1983. Chuck Spinney retired from the Pentagon after 33 years and currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean.