Polling the Horse Race

I know that many people here--including some military leaders--keep talking about the "resurgent" Taliban in Afghanistan, but do these polling numbers indicate anything even close to that view of the war in Afghanistan?

Yes, some polling numbers are better since the surge began at the end of the Bush adminstration, but it was never bad.

Assuming the data can be trusted, we are and have been doing far better than the Taliban in winning hearts and minds--and convincing Afghans about who the strong horse is.

Just have patience.

Harold and Kumar Go to South Waziristan

May these idiots enjoy their Pakistan accomodations:

A Pakistani court formally charged Wednesday five young Americans of plotting terrorism in the country, their lawyer said, in a case that has raised alarm over the danger posed by militants using the Internet.

The students, in their 20s and from the U.S. state of Virginia, were detained in December in the town of Sargodha, 190 km (120 miles) southeast of Islamabad, and accused of contacting militants over the Internet and plotting attacks.

If convicted, they'll spend a lot of time there. And yes, they're idiots even if they are innocent of the charges.

They won't be lucky enough to end up in Guantanamo Bay.

Just a Little Bit Pregnant

My. This is dumb:

Today, the United States has been actively fighting two wars with high casualty rates for both sides. It would be valuable for the commander in chief and senior military leaders to consider the merits of a nonlethal approach to warfare.

The term “nonlethal weapon” generally refers to weapons intended to be less likely to kill or to cause great bodily injury than a conventional weapon, i.e., guns, missiles, bombs, etc.

Nonlethal weapons can include chemical and biological agents, electroshock devices, acoustic devices, optical munitions, blunt or rubber projectiles, traction modifiers, nets or rapid-hardening rigid foam, radio frequency or microwave technologies, computer viruses, noxious smells, and acoustical interference technologies.

One, our side has not been suffering heavy casualties. And two, it's a good thing that the enemy is suffering casualties.
 
Oh! And bonus density! He uses as an example the so-called "threat" of nonlethal munitions to cover the withdrawal of peacekeepers from Somalia! That is not an example of winning a war. That's an example of an enemy allowing us to run away. Be still my heart. At best, it is an example of crowd control.
 
I have one question? How do we get the enemy to agree to one massive tickle fight on the battlefield? Because if our jihadi enemies don't agree to that, we'll face the situation of our guys trying to incapacitate the enemy while they kill us.
 
Imagine how that will work. Our guys will be burdened with body armor and MRAPs since our enemies will still try to kill our troops. And the enemy can run around, in t-shirts and trackshoes, more mobile because they are confident that maybe they'll get dizzy and vomit if we catch up to them.
 
And so what if we do incapacitate them and capture them? Could we hold them? Hah! Look how much trouble we have with the ones we do capture. Can you imagine the human rights lobby going ape over so many prisoners if we actually capture those we currently kill? At least the volume would overwhelm the number of lawyers in America willing to defend them (I hope), but other than that, what's the up side?
 
The effect on our morale and their morale would be obvious. Our guys would feel like they can never win and our enemies would feel like they can hardly lose. What's the downside for continuing the fight for them, after all?
 
And these issues are separate from the fact that "nonlethal" weapons are really just "usually not lethal" weapons.
 
Kill our jihadi enemies. Keep killing them. And then kill them some more until the idea of joining the jihad is a cruel joke said in hushed tones to scare small children in Karachi.
 
Anything less than fighting a war to win is foolish.

Mad!

Lamb made a newspaper recently. It is a four-pager titled simply "The Newspaper" The lead story was something about two people. It had a picture of two people--no faces--accompanied by squiggly lines indicating a story.

Page two had a happy person waving pennants of some sort, and a happy person at a restaurant holding food and a drink with a straw. And accompanying stories, of course.

Page three had stories of a happy girl with really large hands and a flower in her hair, plus a story about a court with a smiling judge and two witnesses in the boxes on either side. The stories remained squigglies so I don't know the details.

The back page, however, was where the real story was. It was the only story with words. Clearly it takes a journalism degree to get rid of those happy stories to the inside and make sure that if it bleeds it leads:

I laughed so hard when I found this lying on the floor one day. The angry teeth-baring protesters carry signs saying "Mad!" The story is that people are mad--very mad. And that it is "not good."

I'm not sure what this is about. But maybe it is all part of that 1848 vibe the world has had lately.

Like the story says, "not good."

Allow Me to Point Out the Obvious

This Guardian writer is perplexed that the American general in Iraq in charge of pulling out our forces is happy as can be:

Leading them is the senior American officer who will orchestrate the military withdrawal, a man who claims he has one of the highest job satisfaction levels in the country.

"I have the best job in Iraq right now," says Brigadier General Paul Wentz, of the US military's 13th Sustainment Command. "There is no question about it."

Whether that assessment is a reflection of the fraught earlier years of the occupation, or the imminent end of an increasingly unpopular war, or the fact that his staff have prepared so well that they can't fail, is open to conjecture. Either way, the men and women of the 13th Sustainment Command are raring to begin the biggest movement of troops and machines anywhere in the world since Vietnam, more than 40 years ago.

Occupation? I think not. We helped support the liberated Iraqis build their country in the face of vicious enemy attacks.

End of an increasingly unpopular war? Americans don't pay much attention to the war since we beat our enemies on the battlefield. I don't even know if our media bother to poll on American support for our actions and presence in Iraq.

Just doing their job well? Sure, in part, but were Brits happy in 1940 over a well executed Dunkirk?

Vietnam comparison? Check. Though I imagine our most recent "biggest" withdrawal would have to be the post-Persian Gulf War movement in 1991. But we won that war so it obviously can't be a Guardian point of comparison.

Let me suggest a reason that BG Wentz is happy: we won on the battlefield and are coming home as victors.

You know, as long as we're conjecturing here.

Let's Talk Real Troubles

It's bad enough that a couple of nutjob American women joined the jihad after converting to Islam. It's bad enough that one of the women turned her 6-year-old son over to the jihadis to teach him to hate Infidels and make pipe bombs. I mean, hey, it takes a village to raise a child, right?

This is the really disturbing part about the broad that pimped out her child to the jihadis:

Her conversion was so complete, Paulin-Ramirez changed her son's name from Christian to the Islamic name Walid after enrolling him in a fire-breathing Muslim school in Ireland.

Contemplate that fact. There is a "fire-breathing Muslim school" in Ireland. Which will train little boys to kill and hate. In Ireland! When you don't have to fly to some remote compound in the frontier areas of Pakistan or Yemen to get your Infidel-killing training and Alahu Akhar! phrase book, can we say we have some problems in the West?

The Irish thought they had The Troubles before? No. That was a stroll in the park. Now they've got real troubles.

Bear Hug

Yeah, what the heck. It was fun being independent and free, but Ukrainians have had enough, I guess:

Ukraine's new governing coalition in parliament said Tuesday it will pass a law against joining military alliances such as NATO, a move that is sure to please Russia while tilting Ukraine away from its previous pro-Western course.

In a statement of purpose published Tuesday in the parliament's official newspaper, the coalition supporting President Viktor Yanukovych said new legislation will "enshrine Ukraine's nonaligned status in law."

As if Moscow will be happy with "nonaligned status" for Ukraine! Failing to ask "how high?" when Moscow tells Kiev to jump will be a dangerous sign of Westward drift as far as the Kremlin in concerned.
 
Ukraine had the choice of being free within NATO or being a vassal state to Russia. They've chosen. Good luck with that.
 

The Tyranny of Distance

Strategypage writes--again--that Chinese military power does not come close to matching our military power and that they cannot threaten us. Strategypage then likens this to over-stating Soviet power during the Cold War, arguing that the Russians were no threat to us.

As I often do when I read these pieces, I like to respond that yes, indeed, our military power is far greater than China's and will likely be far greater than China's for as far as the eye can see. And even if China matches or exceeds us, we're likely to have far greater deployable power than China which faces nearby enemies and potential enemies on their borders.

But to conclude that China is therefore no threat ignores the fact that China can be a threat to our interests near their shores and in a localized conflict. Anyone remember the Korean War?

Today, the threat is over Taiwan. Again, China does not have to beat us to defeat us. China has to beat Taiwan. And to beat Taiwan, all China has to do in regard to America is delay us long enough to defeat Taiwan.

China could build a small core of more effective forces in order to conquer Taiwan even as their overall military remains of poorer quality.

As an aside, I also disagree with their assertion about the Soviet threat to America. Yes, we were stronger than the Soviets in the Cold War, but we faced a worse problem geographically than in regard to Taiwan. In NATO, the critical battlefield was West Germany and the Soviets had the advantage of being near with most of their power, while we were far and had but a fraction of our power available to fight on day one of a soviet invasion.

Apartments of Mass Destruction?

I can't believe that the issue of apartment building on disputed land in the West Bank is creating a crisis in US-Israeli relations. Sure, it was rude to announce it during our vice president's visit, but come on.

I was going to blog on the bizarre contrast of anger at Israel on this issue with our outreach to Iran and Syria, but this author did it for me.

It's a wonder we still have any friends at all left.

UPDATE: For an administration that claims it is out to "repair" the damage that George W. Bush did to our alliances, it sure is working hard to make 2001 to 2008 look like a Golden Age of Allies. How many friends will we have when 2012 comes to a close?

But then, I've been complaining about this for more than a year now.

At the Joe

It's already playoff time for the Red Wings with every game counting to make it into the post-season.

Mister and I went to see the Red Wings beat the Sabres (with Miller--Team USA's goalie in the Olympics--guarding their net) on Saturday. It was a great game with a thrilling fast two goals for Detroit, and then a slow tying of the game by Buffalo, followed by an overtime goal to give Detroit the win and two points:

Give me a break on the picture--I'm taking it.

The lads are getting ready to play:

Father-son time doesn't get much better. We have one more game at the Joe this year--assuming I don't get tickets for a playoff game!

Go Wings! Beat Calgary!

Transitioning to the Traditional Excuse

Secretary Gates explains that it really wasn't George W. Bush's fault that Iran won't agree to halt pursuit of nuclear weapons:

The president's policy over the past year, of reaching out to Iran, was in the hope that the Iranians would respond positively and provide a way out of the current difficulties that the international community has with Iran.

As has become clear, the Iranians have rebuffed the initiatives of the president for a better relationship. By the same token, his policy of engagement has now exposed the Iranian regime, for what it is, and their unwillingness to try and find a negotiated outcome here.

Still, some delusions persist, as if our years of quiet talks with Iran and approval of European efforts to talk to Iran didn't demonstrate our willingness to use diplomacy instead of force and so earn the support of allies for sanctions as a step in between:

And that creates the basis I think for widespread support for moving to greater pressure on Iran, in an effort to persuade its leaders to change course and to acknowledge that they will not pursue nuclear weapons.

I think that one of the benefits of the president's policy has been that it has contributed to very broad support in the international community as well as here in the region.

And that is the direction in which we are headed, for a new U.N. Security Council resolution, which in turn will provide a legal platform for individual countries that may wish to take more severe action, economic action.

We can't get China, Russia, or even Brazil, to agree on sanctions that hurt even now. Who is Gates fooling, here? Any sanctions we can get with the sainted international community's blessings will be so weak that they will be meaningless. And any tough sanctions that we apply and ask for voluntary compliance in enforcing will be ignored by enough countries to make them meaningless.
 
And besides, the sainted international community (and our Left) has always had a trump card to play when it comes to looking the other way as Iran goes nuclear, as the Al Arabiya interviewer asked:
 

The prevailing view in the Arab world is that the U.S. avoids talking about Israel's nuclear arsenal. Does this weaken the American campaign against the Iranian nuclear program morally and politically?

It's funny how the Islamic world can't solve its problems until some Israeli-related issue is resolved first. At some point, when does that claim become obviously an excuse to do nothing?

For a while, the Moslem world and their Leftist allies in the West chose to blame George W. Bush (and the dreaded Neo-Cons) for the lack of progress in Moslem issues. But with Bush gone, they're transitioning back to the traditional game of blaming the Jews.

Mailing the White Flag

Mark Steyn has written quite a lot about the slow surrender of Western Europe to Islamic thinking as Moslems immigrate to Western countries and the native Europeans give in to direct and indirect demands to accomodate the most radical form of Islam as a distinct entity within Europe and adjust European society to adapt to that new entity's society and legal thinking.

While I think that the Europeans will in the end go Mediaeval on this threat when push comes to shove, actions like this don't exactly fill me with hope:

In late April, if all goes according to plan, a resident of Kabul will fold up a paper ballot and push in into an empty box. It will mark the first time an Afghan citizen will have voted - for a candidate in the United Kingdom.

That's the idea behind an initiative called Give Your Vote, in which U.K. citizens will voluntarily give up their votes in the parliamentary elections expected to take place May 6 to residents in the developing world. The aim is less to tip the British elections one way or the other than to highlight the limitations of local decision-making in an increasingly interconnected world. "Right now, the people making decisions on things like climate change aren't getting their authority from the guy in Bangladesh whose house is being flooded," says James Sadri, one of the founders of Egality, the British activist group behind the project. "But what if the politicians did have to answer to these people? Would it change their position on climate change, poverty and war?" (See pictures of the presidential election in Afghanistan.)

Here's how the program, which launches on March 15, will work: British volunteers will pose questions from people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana to U.K. parliamentary candidates at town hall meetings or through party offices, and the answers will then be discussed on television and radio in each of the three countries. A week before the U.K. vote, Egality will hold an American Idol-style election in the countries, in which people will cast votes for their preferred U.K. party - Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat. The following week, British citizens who decide to participate in the program - organizers are hoping for a few thousand - will receive a text message from Egality telling them how to cast their ballot. The votes will be doled out based on the proportion each party received in the overseas elections.

Wow. Surrender your Vote, is more like it. The priceless right of electing their leaders, won over centuries of struggle, is to be surrendered in a game show format. How much more symbolic can the decline of the West get? Not exactly a "we will fight them on the beaches" moment for our British friends, eh?
 
You'd think that the British would understand--after wishing so hard that they could have a chance to vote in our 2008 presidential election--that such ideas don't work out as you hope.
 
While the people likely to turn over their hard-won vote to foreigners are likely to vote for the jihadi-friendly (or jihadi-appeasing) types, is it really a stretch to see this voluntary program extended as a right at some point in the future? Perhaps reserving a certain percent of the vote to foreigners? Or simply letting resident aliens vote since they are allowing non-resident aliens to vote from abroad? After all, they could argue, how fair is it to allow distant people to vote when some of your neighbors can't vote?
 
It isn't enough to worry that the British (and other Europeans) will wave the white flag of surrender when radical Islamic thinking rises to dominating levels. Now we have to worry that the Europeans will mail the white flag to the Third World, saving the jihadi types the trouble of actually coming to Britain to demand surrender.
 
This is not Britain's finest hour.

A Base By Any Other Name?

China is building a commercial presence in a North Korean port (which my atlas calls Najin and not Rajin) on the Sea of Japan:

China has gained direct access to the Sea of Japan for the first time in 100 years through a North Korean port, leaving the other two regional players, Japan and South Korea, deeply concerned about the communist state’s ambitions.

China made an agreement to lease a pier at North Korea’s Rajin Port for 10 years, China’s Global Times, an official newspaper and the international arm of the People’s Daily, said on Wednesday. China claims the move is purely economic.

“China has finally found a direct trade outlet to the Sea of Japan … It is the country’s first access to the maritime space in its north-east since it was blocked over a century ago,” said the newspaper, adding that infrastructure renovation is “currently underway”.

 
Japan and South Korea are a bit concerned, it seems.
 
For now it is to be a commercial port. But building the infrastructure of a proper Chinese port facility means it could be quickly turned into a military facility. You know, in case China takes over all or even part of North Korea in a collapse scenario. Of course, absorbing Najin means that Russia gets cut out of the partition of North Korea that I speculated about five years ago.

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

It has always annoyed me that the jihadis claim the mantle of keeper of the true faith when it comes to Islam.

For those who claim that jihadis have nothing to do with Islam, explain to me why jihadis so often get their way in defining their own view of Islam as the true form? When non-jihadi Moslems fight jihadis, there is always that "problem" that consists of the issue that it is tough to get Moslems to fight other Moslems.

Yet the jihadi Moslems have no problem killing other Moslems. Jihadis use mosques to store arms and hide in--yet it is wrong to violate the sanctity of a mosque to search them.

It is wrong to catch a glimpse of enticing female ankle flesh, so women should be hidden--yet it is ok to use such hidden women to disguise bombs that target other Moslems.

And of course, in the West, our more culturally sensitive citizens insist it is anti-Islamic (against all Moslems) to point out that jihadis rather successfully appeal to Islamic solidarity to gain support. As a percentage, more Moslems reject the appeal than they did before 9/11 and the Iraq experience of seeing jihadis gleefully slaughtering Moslems, but the jihadis count on even the reduced amount of support to continue their murder spree.

And here we have a jihadi exploiting Islam by appealing to Islam in order to kill the non-jihadi Moslem:

An American al-Qaida suspect detained in Yemen fooled his hospital guards into unshackling him by asking to join them for prayers, security officials said Saturday. He then killed a guard who laid down his weapon as he went ahead at prayer time.

The new details of Sharif Mobley's failed escape attempt, obtained by The Associated Press, indicate the 26-year-old American of Somali descent has a level of training and cunning characteristic of the terror network.

The guard was gullible enought to think that the jihadi was a true Moslem--but Mobley clearly felt no solidarity based on Islam with his Moslem guard. At least not enough solidarity to not kill him.

Can we at least agree that false Islamic faith is the last refuge of a scoundrel? Kill the jihadis. It is no insult to Islam to do so. Indeed, it is a kindness to Islam to help them kill off the jihadis who give them all a bad name.

On the bright side, after years of enemy offensives that accelerated during Ramadan, confused Westerners no longer speak of Ramadan ceasefires being culturally sensitive to our enemies.

Universal Insurance Policy

Iraq's election is a good thing. But it is just one more good thing on a path that requires many more good things to achieve a lasting victory. We're past the military victories that were good things on the past, but the future good things are important to transform the victory of flipping Iraq from Saddam's enemy status to the current friend status.

As I've written since even before the Syrian- and Iranian-stoked violence that required the surge, we need to stay in Iraq to cement rule of law and provide a visible guarantee to all Iraqi groups that they don't need to worry about another group going outside the law to seize power.

Gerecht has a good piece on Iraq, including this advice:

The next few months will be telling as politicians come down to earth after the campaign. If the Sunnis can live with the fact that a democratic Iraq will always disappoint their clannish aspirations for political preeminence and a right to live off state subsidies, then Iraq’s future is pretty bright. The Americans really ought to have one overwhelming goal: hang around. Not in large numbers. The drawdown of U.S. troops is a good idea. But we should view Iraq the same way we viewed postwar Germany, France, and Italy. The presence of American troops was the ultimate guarantor that those countries would not slip back into dictatorship.

Washington shouldn’t choose sides in Iraq, and it shouldn’t intervene in Iraqi politics except in extremis. But we do want to be there, in the background, as we were in Europe. Even Shiite politicians who vociferously oppose an American troop presence can privately suggest a more nuanced view. As the journalist Tom Ricks has suggested, American combat troops could be given a more anodyne label—stabilization forces, a support presence. Our training mission with the Iraqi Army and police is going to take years. Needless to say, most Sunnis will be thrilled. The problem will be with the Shia. We’ve not played Shiite politics brilliantly (as the stupid war against Chalabi demonstrates). But a constructive, unobtrusive U.S. presence is doable if the Obama administration handles the issue deftly.


If the White House really is worried that Iraq could become an Iranian satrapy, that’s another reason for a small but potent U.S. military force to stay there. Iraqi democracy is a big deal. The American left and right, which have dismissed its evolution and belittled the American achievement in giving it birth, are stuck in the past, in an unchanging Middle East that never existed. What’s happened in Iraq since 2003—and what’s happened in Iran since last June 12—really ought to plant the possibility that the Islamic Middle East isn’t a hopeless case. Some change there just might be progress. Accepting this will cause indigestion for those who’ve been unalterably attached to the image of post-Saddam Iraq as “the biggest strategic failure in American history” and who’ve denounced the pointlessness of promoting democracy “through the barrel of a gun.” Unfortunately, Barack Obama once belonged to this group. But as president he has proven flexible in foreign affairs. With him, as with Iraq after another successful election—freer and more competitive than any election in the history of the Middle East—there are reasons to hope.

I do have hope that President Obama can shepherd Iraq forward by refusing to bug out too early. My hope isn't based on any particular confidence in the president's ideology or foreign policy skills. As I've long thought, I still think that the president practices foreign policy in a manner to minimize the distraction it provides from trying to achieve domestic transformation to the left. If it would cause more distractions to lose a battle, he'll try to win it. If it causes more problems to win, he'll retreat. In Iraq and in Afghanistan, so far, I believe the calculation thus far is that losing would cause more domestic problems than continuing Bush policies that put us on a path to victories.

I'll have more confidence if the president negotiates a pact with Iraq's new government that continues to allow American combat brigades (regardless of what they are called, like the new "advisory and assistance brigades" (BCTs with more advisors in them) that are replacing our brigade combat teams) in Iraq after 2011.

I'd like to see a Stryker brigade in the north to reassure Kurds and try to hold the line on sectarian violence upt there, while helping to hunt  the rump al Qaeda. Add a heavy brigade and motorized infantry brigade combat teams deployed from Fallujah to Baghdad in the center; and a couple heavy brigade combat teams in the Shia south to watch the Iranians there. With a battalion task force in Kuwait centered on equipment that can quickly be reinforced to a full BCT, another BCT equipment set in the region, and an afloat Marine Expeditionary Unit in the region (plus air and naval assets, of course), we'd have a potent combat force both to worry Iran and Syria and reassure Iraqis that we hold the ring against both internal and external threats.

While the calculations could change and lead to retreat, I hope that the current math doesn't change and we can pursue victory in Iraq.

Bring Out Your Sad!

Huh. You've heard of the saying, "the beatings will continue until morale improves"?

Well, this business owner turns that thinking up to "11."

About 10 years ago I was having my annual holiday party, and my niece had come with her newly minted M.B.A. boyfriend. As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.

Then, figuring I would take his new degree for a test drive, I asked him how he thought I did that. "I'm sure you treat them well," he replied.

"That's half of it," I said. "Do you know what the other half is?"

He didn't have the answer, and neither have the many other people that I have told this story. So what is the answer? I fired the unhappy people. People usually laugh at this point. I wish I were kidding.

Yeah. I wonder how long it took for his employees to realize that the saddest seemed to bite the dust? I sure bet reported "happiness" improved as he made his rounds through the office.
 


I can see his office now.



Yes, indeed, it's a good office. Nobody thinks bad thoughts about Mr. Goltz. It's a very happy office.

Over The (Beep) Top

Are we witnessing the first hints of a transformation in warfare (and not the one we are planning) on the Israel-Gaza border?

So what is the Hamas response to Israeli tactics that don't even give the terrorists the pleasure of at least killing a Jew before they are killed?

Over the last five years, Israel has automated it's security along the Gaza border. Vidcams, with magnification and night vision capability, cover much of the border where Palestinian terrorists try to plant bombs next to Israeli patrol routes, or to try and get through the security fence.

Remotely controlled gun towers with sensors and machine guns, robotic vehicles, and backed up by troops only when necessary. What's the glory in being killed by R2D2 for your terrorist grunt brought up on the joys of killing Israelis? I suspect that this is discouraging to even the most committed jihadi. I mean, what does the Koran say about dying in battle when you are killed by a souped up toaster and not an Infidel?

I have to wonder if the next step is for Hamas to switch to robots to attack the Israeli border defense robots. Perhaps crawling mobile mines or EFPs try to work their way through the border defenses, taking days or weeks to try and evade detection. Maybe tunnels are dug to push the robot to the surface where it will begin its infiltration mission. Perhaps UAVs  with mine or EFP payloads are sent on one-way missions to land by a road to hit an Israeli vehicle. Perhaps the crawlers wash up on shore as "junk" and then move out. Or maybe terrorists assemble a robotic terrorist inside a city or out in the countryside and then set it to deploy and attack hours or days after the construction team leaves?

Perhaps enough terrorist robots can overwhelm the robotic sensors to clear a path to allow "human" terrorists to exploit the gap and actually reach human targets before getting themselves killed.

Of course, I fully expect that one day even conventional warfare will have this feature. First robotic and remotely controlled recon elements and outposts will duel in the no-man's land between armies.

Eventually, more and more of the armies (and aerial units) will be robots or remotely controlled. In time. we may return to mass armies and attrition tactics, but with robots replacing humans as the cannon fodder that we shovel at each other.

Which means that the ability to out-produce rather than out-breed the enemy becomes important as armies need constant replacements for the robot casualties. This will be a dramatic change from the small professional armies that advanced countries developed over the last several decades and which seems like the wave of the future.

We've seen small professional armies replaced by mass armies before. I suspect we'll see the same happen again. But at least this time there will be fewer letters to parents since scrap iron won't be mourned.

This will raise lots of broader questions, too. If people worry that the public is disconnected from war because we rely on so few volunteers to fight in our military as compared to our total population, what will the effect be when relatively few soldiers die in battle behind the shield of robots? What are war crimes in those circumstances and who is prosecuted? And what happens when you don't surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri but to the battleship?

Could we see the first hints of this transformation from small, professional armies to mass robotic armies on the Israel-Gaza border?

Preparing to Fail in Two Contingencies

The QDR sets assumptions for force planning (or force rationalization, depending on how you want to look at it). Fine. But how can Defense Department officials perpetuate this fiction?

Rather than focusing on preparing to fight two major wars at the same time to achieve these goals, the military instead must prepare to "succeed in a wide range of contingencies," the official said.

While this decision signals a major change in a policy that has been the staple of U.S. force planning since the 1990s, the official emphasized that this new direction was, in fact, a continuation of the previous administration's work in the 2006 QDR.

We're just now stopping the assumption that we can fight two wars at once? Oh, please!

We have not had a two-war strategy for a very long time. That 1990s strategy called for us to be able to fight two wars nearly simultaneously. That is, if two enemies attack at once, we hold in the less important theater while we focus on the most important one and win there; after which we shift resources to the holding front and win there. I think the last round of the QDR we changed "nearly simultaneously" to "in overlapping time frames," which is the same thing.

The danger in not undestanding that we are continuing the same assumptions we've had for fifteen years is that by trying to argue that only now are we reducing our warfighting goal from two wars to less than that is that it will be used to argue we need less capability. After all, the reasoning could go, why prepare for two war-level forces as we did in the past when we no longer need to fight two wars?

The problem is, we never planned to fight two wars. So we cannot justify reducing defense spending on the assumption that we don't need to achieve as much.

Squirming

This is good news:

The Afghan Taliban's former second in command has been "singing like a male canary" since his capture last month, officials here told The Washington Examiner.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was arrested by Pakistani security agencies in Karachi, has become "a vital asset in gathering information on the Taliban and other extremist groups operating in the region," one Pakistani counterintelligence official said.

And even if he isn't singing like a canary, saying he is could cause rats to scurry because they know if he is talking he'd talk about them. So just watching to see if anyone runs or disappears--or just starts calling around a lot to get reassurance that all is well--will tell us a lot even if Baradar isn't talking.

Sure, for many captured terrorists, the friends of that terrorist have to assume the captured guy will talk, and only hope the captured guy resists talking long enough for colleagues to go to ground. But can the Taliban under Baradar afford to scatter--and leave subordinates leaderless--when a high-ranking guy is swept up? Wouldn't these guys double the guards and watch the skies more closely but continue to operate until they know they've been fingered and located?

The enemy just can't know for sure whether news like this is true or not--which is why just the capture is useful even if he never talks at all.

Fields of Fire

The ability of smaller units to slug it out with access to recon and precision strike assets is fairly amazing to me. And with organic UAVs reaching down lower and lower, this ability to spread units out continues the long trend of moving away from a line of troops standing and firing shoulder-to-shoulder.

Organic precision firepower will drop to battalion level with precision 120mm mortar shells that will reach units in Afghanistan this year:

The program -- called Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative (APMI) -- emerged as a result of an urgent request from commanders in Afghanistan who seek the ability to pinpoint targets using precision or GPS -guided mortar rounds.

APMI improves upon the 136-meter Circular Error Probable (CEP) of conventional mortars by reducing it to about 10-meters, said Bruce Kay, Department of the Army Systems Coordinator, Mortar Systems.

"This is a 120mm mortar round that provides precision capability to ground forces. A current conventional mortar round has an accuracy of about a 136-meter CEP. With APMI, we have been able to demonstrate a less than 10-meter CEP," Kay said. "This provides a far improved capability to the ground forces commander. "

Get precision into 81mm mortars and a company becomes potent.

Drop it down to 60mm mortars and platoons expand their horizons.

Those little UAVs at these levels become far more lethal teamed with organic precision firepower even if the HE content is small.

And the reduction in the supply burden will be significant, although as the article says, we'll still need area and suppressive fire using dumb bombs. If we can see something, precision lets us kill it; but if we can't see the target, covering a broad area just in case would waste the expensive precision mortar bombs.

Smaller and smaller units will not know the demoralizing effect of just having to sit and take punishment because an enemy's weapons outrange their own, relying on higher echelons to intervene and save their bacon.