Guided By Hope and Change

You remember the "kill list" our president established, right?

Secret government documents leaked to the public on Thursday detail the United States’s escalating reliance on drones — and warn that they can be counter-productive and cause a staggering civilian toll.

The cache of documents from an unidentified intelligence official was published by The Intercept and appear to complicate the Obama administration’s narrative about the country’s ongoing military involvement around the world. ...

Among other conclusions, the documents appear to indicate that unintended casualties of drone strikes sometimes far outweigh those of the intended targets. In one five-month period, for instance, just one in 10 people killed in airstrikes was the declared target.

First off, don't assume that this means 90% of the dead are innocent civilians as they want you to believe.

Given our targeting procedures, it is likely that the vast majority of the dead were enemy combatants even if they weren't high ranking enough to be on a list of declared targets. So that statistic is meaningless.

It's meaningless unless the critics of the program want to argue that the Obama administration has a rule that any person running away from a declared target is a Taliban; and that any person refusing to run away from a declared target is just a well disciplined Taliban.

And don't forget, you can kill civilians while in the process of killing enemies. If the target is important enough, it is not a war crime if civilians die if you take as much care as you can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties.

Proportionality comes into play here, too. It is not legal to nuke a city to take out a sniper in a building at the edge of said city.

Since the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan allow our drone strikes, it apparently isn't that maddening or counter-productive.

Honestly, for some, whatever we do will piss them off.

And for another class of "some," if our current president does it, it can't be wrong!

I'm just grateful we try to kill any enemies at all.

UPDATE: Strategypage writes about the real reason drones can work--when they are directed by people on the ground, as the CIA does it.

To Be Or Not To Be Classified

You wonder why I think the media tilts to the Left?

So I see this headline: "CIA shrugs off Clinton’s ‘classified’ email".

And I think, whoa, the CIA doesn't think Clinton's private email issue is important at all? How can that be?

Then I read the article (how many people moved past the all-clear signal of the headline?) and find out that the CIA cleared a single email message:

The credibility of the Republican-led Benghazi committee came under fresh attack Sunday after the CIA informed the panel that it does not view a 2011 email forwarded by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as including any classified information.

So a single email message was shrugged off. And that undermines the committee's credibility?

So one down. Only 30,000 (that we know of) to go.

But wait. It gets better.

After the CIA shrugged off the email as no big deal, the committee released it to the public. What difference does it make, right?

Behold the outrage storm!

The Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi hastily deleted the name of a high-level Libyan defector from one of its public releases on Monday, shortly after Yahoo News reported the panel had inadvertently revealed the defector’s name in an effort to embarrass Hillary Clinton.

The error has put the committee on the defensive, the writer says.

Remember, according to the first article:

[A] CIA official informed the committee that the agency does not view that email, among 127 previously undisclosed messages sent by Blumenthal to Clinton that the panel plans to release this week, as having any portions that need to be redacted because they include classified information. [emphasis added]

So is it bad that the committee released the email insufficiently redacted or good that Clinton mishandled a document with no classified information?

With our press corps, the answer is of course, both are true.

UPDATE: The CIA shrugged off the disclosure of the name:

The CIA has told Congress that the name of an alleged secret agency source, mentioned but then partially redacted by the U.S. State Department from an email received on Hillary Clinton's private server was not considered by the agency to be secret at all.

Oh, those crazy conspiracy theories.

Stop Swooning Over Obama

Fareed Zakaria--God bless him, but he couldn't find his own buttocks with both hands and a GPS signal--actually compares President Obama's foreign policy with Eisenhower's.

While I agree it is a mistake to swoon over Putin's actions, the notion that our policy is Eisenhower-like is nonsense:

It’s true that it has been a quarter-century since Moscow has been so interventionist outside its borders. The last time it made these kinds of moves, in the late 1970s and 1980s, it invaded Afghanistan and interfered in several other countries as well. Back then, commentators similarly hailed those actions as signs that Moscow was winning the Cold War. How did that work out for the Soviet Union? ...

The 1950s abounded with what seem in retrospect deeply dangerous proposals designed to demonstrate U.S. vigor ...

In the midst of this clamor for action, one man, President Dwight Eisenhower, kept his cool, even though it sank his poll numbers. (The Kennedy/Johnson administration ended the passivity, notably in Cuba and Vietnam, with disastrous results.) I believe that decades from now, we will be glad that Barack Obama chose Eisenhower’s path to global power and not Putin’s.

One, resisting Putin is not the same as Putin's militarized path to conquest and power. What kind of equivalence nonsense is that?

But at least Zakaria admits Putin is striving for world power.

Zakaria conflates Eisenhower's refusal to act directly against the far weaker Soviet Union in the 1950s (Ike knew there was no "missile gap" showing nuclear inferiority) with the USSR's failure by the end of the 1980s that was facilitated not by Eisenhower-like "passivity" but by Reagan's vigorous action to actively defeat Soviet aggression and defeat the Soviet Union itself.

Eisenhower also had the reputation of having led the West into battle in Europe in World War II. No Russian leader could discount that.

Our enemies now have to worry about a president who organized communities rather than a global coalition to liberate western Europe from Nazi and Fascist control.

And remember that Eisenhower had massive nuclear superiority over Moscow yet still increased military spending and even maintained a modernized Army of 15 divisions and 900,000 troops in the active forces (1958).

We're scheduled for ten division equivalents with 450,000 troops with the possibility of going down to 8 divisions if the Army is cut to 420,000 because of further budget reductions.

Zakaria is simply trying to paint inaction as a winning strategy. I do not believe Russian weaknesses are an excuse to do nothing, counting on Russia to fail on their own.

Russian weaknesses are a reason to do something to keep them from winning by picking on even weaker opponents.

Stop swooning over Putin? Stop swooning over our current president. Or at least get a room.

Because Getting Russians To Leave Is So Easy?

Ex-Soviet republics should be careful about inviting Russian troops to set up camp on their soil.

Uh oh:

The leaders of ex-Soviet grouping the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) met at the Burabai resort near the Kazakh capital, Astana.

They agreed on the creation of what is described in a summit document as a "grouping of border (forces) and other institutions from CIS member states designed to resolve crisis situations on the external borders".

Are these leaders insane? They really want to contemplate the introduction of Russian troops?

Everyone knows we leave--even when we shouldn't. Even modern Germans leave without incident if you ask.

Shouldn't people have learned that prying Russians out of your country--especially when the Russians still think of you as provinces that are only temporarily not under their control--is costly?

Tajikistan, which hit the lottery by getting the Russians out in 2005 without a long war, should not push their luck. Russia under Putin in 2015 is way different than Russia of 2005. See Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas.

Good grief, Other ex-Soviet countries have learned that just letting Russian energy supplies into their territory is dangerous:

Poland on Thursday signed a landmark deal to build the first EU gas pipeline to the isolated Baltic countries, reducing their uneasy reliance on Russian supplies. ...

"You have ended the energy isolation of the Baltics. You have ended their long-lasting dependence on a single supplier," [European Commission President] Juncker said.

Yeah. Ukraine has learned, too, but can't do much about it yet. And they've learned about the difficulty of removing Russian troops, too.

The Temporary Silence of the Lambs

What if Romney was president now?

If Romney were president right now, the White House would be surrounded by protesters and candlelight peace vigils night and day. Some would wave American flags, some would wave signs calling for impeachment, some would have pictures caricaturing the president as Hitler or an animal. They would chant “Not in our name!”, or “Bring them home!”, or “Hey ho, hey ho, Romney has got to go!”

If Romney were president, nightly news reports on CBS, NBC, and ABC would have regular features on war crimes, quagmires, and collateral damage. ...

If Romney were president, every political analyst left of Judge Napolitano would be fretting over the war-weary public turning the upcoming election into a referendum against the president and his party. ...

If Romney were president, MSNBC would be holding mock war crimes tribunals on Chris Hayes, explaining the ins and outs of the process with expert guests. ...

If Romney were president, Democrats in Congress would be calling for hearings and investigations for each transgression: the bombing, troop levels, and drone policy.

But Romney is not our president. Barack Obama is president.

Even as President Obama took the lead in wars, the Left has shrugged. Those communist-front "peace" protests (yes, if you looked at who organized them as opposed to who went to them, that's who was there) are still around, even showing up for the Occupy Wall Street open-air sewers.

It was disturbing how the media amplified their message by concealing their roots.

But no worries, the anti-war movement and the fawning media coverage will spring into action in November 2016 if a Republican wins the election.

And God forbid the outraged reaction on the Left if the new president has a homelessness emergency in his home state.

Tip to Instapundit.

UPDATE: And it isn't just some Americans who have suddenly discovered how cool war is if a Republican isn't in the White House (and never mind their party contributed to the Congressional bipartisan "declaration of war"). The Global Left that hated Bush for liberating Iraqis seems to have no problem with Putin protecting Assad the butcher:

Russia’s recent military intervention in Syria doesn’t seem to have provoked the same reaction worldwide as the one the US faced against Assad in retaliation to the chemical gas attacks in Syria in August 2013. While the demonstration against the US airstrikes brought together the left and the right in major world cities, Russia’s intervention hasn’t prompted a strong reaction even from those who are considered ‘friends of Syria.’ This is not the first time that the reactions of anti-war coalitions and peace movements differ on the Syrian conflict, based on the actors calling for them. Iranian support to the Assad regime, for instance, with armed militias, weaponry, money, military experts, etc., has also gone unnoticed.

You can be sure that no lefties in Europe are deluded enough to believe they should go to Syria to act as human shields against Putin's air force and artillery.

Because the human shields would die, of course.

Recycling the F-15

Strategypage writes that the F-15 is being designed to be a stealthy fighter that could supplement the F-22 in air-to-air combat.

The F-15 is an old but solid frame that was once our high end fighter. Could it continue as a frontline fighter?

Sensing an opportunity the manufacturer of the 1970s era F-15 jet fighter are offering another upgrade, one what uses new missile racks and novel use of hard points usually reserved for extra fuel, to create an F-15 that can carry 16 long range (AMRAAM) air-to-air missiles rather than the usual eight. This enables an F-15 equipped with the latest radars and fire control systems to quickly attack enemy aircraft before those fighters are close enough to hit the F-15. The F-22 and F-35 were designed to excel at BVR (Beyond Visual Range) encounters where longer range AMRAAM missiles could take out enemy fighters up to 70 kilometers away. But there are too few F-22s and the F-35s are suffering an unending series of delays.

And with frontal stealth, working with F-22s, these planes could work to undermine the Russian and Chinese plans to overwhelm our F-22s with their own frontal stealth planes streaking in at high speed to launch a barrage of missiles against our outnumbered planes and their AWACS and tanker support aircraft.

Or maybe the F-35 will work as advertised and on time.

It's a Matter of Tail--Not Tooth

Is Japan's military a toothless tiger? I'd worry more about the tail.

This article wonders of Japan is a toothless tiger. It is not battle tested, to be sure, but as the article discusses, it is well equipped and does train to high standards. So Japan's military has teeth.

The problem is the lack of tail--the logistics backing to maintain a fight or fight away from Japan--as the article notes:

However, the truth is that Japan's military would not be able to defend Japan alone in the long-run nor go on the offensive, primarily because of its lack of offensive weapons, limited manpower and equipment pool.

Behind the JSDF stands the US, and therein lies any strength it might wield.

Too much can be made of lack of "offensive" weapons. F-16s are fighter planes but with precision weapons do well for ground support in practice. And while Japan does not have aircraft carriers, they do have "helicopter destroyers" that look suspiciously like small aircraft carriers. F-35s as well as helicopters can fly from them.

For a fight over the Senkaku Islands, as long as we help Japan behind the front, I think Japan could win.

But it is true that Japan would rely on us for a lot of logistics to keep fighting for long. That is a common issue with our allies (in part deliberately encouraged to keep allies on a short leash so they don't drag us into war). See our resupply efforts for NATO allies in the war against Libya's tiny military in 2011.

I'd be happier if Japan had a more powerful air force. But short of nuclear weapons, Japan would be a formidable foe for China.

Knowing Who's Naughty or Nice is Just the Start

The first Democratic debate's embrace of socialism indicates that the Democrats are running for Santa Claus and not for president.

This seems appropriate (tip to Legal Insurrection):



We shall see if the American people want a president or somebody dispensing free stuff with a cackle ho ho ho.

Actually, I'm being unfair to Santa Claus. Santa actually gives to those who are nice and stiffs the naughty.

Democrats assume that if they give enough to them, the most naughty will become nice.

UPDATE: The poor are getting richer even though the rich get richer; the condition of our poor compares rather well to Europe's median income; and restricting freedom won't eliminate inequality--nor should we want to:

The fundamental producer of income inequality is freedom. Individuals have different aptitudes and attitudes. Not even universal free public education, even were it well done, could equalize the ability of individuals to add value to the economy.

I am no less happy with my life because the upper income brackets have made far greater gains than I am likely (but who knows?) to ever experience. And a system that drags down those upper brackets to make them closer to me is likely to suppress my standard of leaving, too.

At this point, I'm far more worried about equality under the law. It should apply to all of us equally, and not just punish the little people.

UPDATE: The technology for knowing who is naughty and who is nice is there:

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’ ” In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance.

And I'm sure there are revolting fanboys of China (why yes, I am speaking of Tom Friedman) who will salute this plan if it can be framed to combat global warming.

Of course, if the revolution comes to China anyway, the people who take control will have an easy measure of who to execute or send to prison and re-education camps.

UPDATE: Americans are instinctively suspicious of "income inequality" talk, which tends to increase distrust of government efforts to combat it (tip to Instapundit). Which is smart:

The first-, second- and fourth-richest counties in the US, and six of the top 10, are suburbs of Washington, DC. Americans have noticed.

It's not just the government employees that create this concentration of wealth. It's also the lobbyists and attorneys who cluster there to get advantages by changing the law (or rules or process) or finding those advantages or places where advantages can be gained.

Not that I'm particularly slamming them. It is legal to petition the government, after all. And when government is so all-important, of course it will attract the attention of lobbyists and lawyers.

The solution is to reduce the scope of authority for the federal government (and hence reduce the number of employees), which will reduce the incentive for lobbyists and lawyers to influence government. Trying to reform the permanent bureaucracy is a fool's game. Do you really think the people who directed the IRS against conservatives can really be reformed because a Republican is put in charge at the very top?

The federal government is just too damn big.

The Support Way Back

We will contest China's illegal claims to territorial waters in the South China Sea. Whatever we send will just be the tip of the spear.

We will challenge China in the South China Sea:

The Obama administration will soon order Navy warships to patrol near man-made islands constructed by China in the South China Sea, a U.S. warning that it will not accept Beijing’s vast territorial claims in the heavily traveled waters, officials said.

The decision about the size and composition of the force has yet to be made.

As I said, whatever we send needs nearby forces in support just in case:

No American ship sent to challenge the illegal 12-mile limits around artificial islands should go alone. It should have plenty of backup nearby.

And we should have means short of force to keep Chinese non-military vessels away from our ship carrying out the challenge.

Heck, I'd put a sizable Marine contingent on whatever ship we send in case the Chinese try to board the vessel after disabling it by ramming or fouling the propellers.

And in the bigger picture, this is a kind of support, too:

The Japanese Maritime-Self Defense Force (JMSF) will join the Indian and American navies in this year’s installment of the Malabar naval exercise held in the Bay of Bengal, the Business Standard reports.

An announcement will be made shortly re-designating what had hitherto been officially an Indian-U.S. bilateral military exercise into a trilateral India-U.S.-Japan event, according to the Business Standard.

China must not be comfortable that a confrontation with any single nation or even a single ship won't bring in this powerful naval coalition against them.

Spartano Delenda Est

The natural order must be restored.

UPDATE: Hah! Yesterday while driving through town, I could have sworn I saw an F-18 flying by. It was different but in an instant of glancing I would have sworn I saw twin canted tails. So I look it up and two EA-18G Growlers (electronic warfare versions of the Navy plane) will conduct a flyover before the game.

UPDATE: over my home!

Thank you Lancers!

UPDATE: That hurt. Exciting game. But that hurt. (Fumble on punt that MSU ran back for touchdown, FYI.)

I was never at the point where I assumed a win. So I've got that going for me.

And I won't blame our kicker--although he needs a lesson in falling on the ball if he doesn't handle the snap. Our offense sputtered in the second half. That touchdown just shouldn't have mattered. But it did.

UPDATE: A new day.

Our team should review errors and failures to exploit opportunities in the whole game. And then prepare for the rest of the schedule. This extreme disappointment must not destroy what could still be a decent season. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, eh?

And when the season is over, remember for next year: Spartano delenda est.

What Armor?

While I have no problem with the usefulness of the new Indian Kolkata class guided missile destroyers, this account of the debate over the vessels is just ... off.

I'm not sure where to begin. Sure, the notion that opponents of these  advance that larger multi-purpose warships are wrong because normal peacetime usage doesn't require all the advanced weaponry is misguided. Naval battles rarely happen. So the logic is that it would be cheaper not to arm any ships at all, really. But you have to prepare for war, no? That's the purpose of a navy?

Heck, why have expensive heavy equipment for any military service, under that logic? Just skip the combat training for infantry and focus on transportation and first aid for humanitarian relief operations, eh? War is so rare, after all.

Yet this "large" Indian ship is smaller than American Burke class destroyers that are the backbone of our fleet. So a comparison to battleships even for purposes of debating large versus small and simple vessels is misleading. It may have misled the author.

While larger ships do offer some protection because of their bulk, modern ships do not have heavy belts of protective armor as ships in the past sported. Spot protection of certain vital areas is as good as it gets nowadays. The author emphasizes this protection yet I see nothing that indicates that the ship class is armored contrary to modern practice.

I think the author is right on the debate. But the debating point is wrong.

And if you want to discuss vulnerability of large Indian ships--and we all should--failure to mention China's anti-ship ballistic missiles (the DF-21 isn't just for America, remember) is a major gap.

Zumwalt Will Live On In Another

Our expensive Zumwalt destroyer class may end at two ships rather than three. But it will live on.

So we will only get two of the 14,000-ton ship class?

The American Zumwalt class destroyers may find its production run truncated yet again, as reports indicate that the third ship of the class, the Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG 1002), is on the budget chopping block. ...

Spreading the R&D cost of $9.6 billion over the original 32 ships would have only added $300 million to the price of each ship. By cutting the program to three units, each ship now shoulders $3.2 billion of the R&D costs.

Given that the research and development costs for DDG-1000 are already spent, the decision should be made narrowly on the cost of actually building the third ship. And since the rule of thumb is 1 ship forward for every 2 back in port, if we want the capabilities that the ship carries to be more or less constantly available, we should build the third.

Regardless, the research and development costs won't be lost. By canceling the ship class, it looks fiscally responsible but it really isn't. It's just accounting, since the next ship built using the exact same technology that by the rules has to be counted against the cost of the ship the research was done for will use Zumwalt technology that is now already paid for. Voila! A cheaper warship.

We should decide on whether we should build more ships based on the success of the ship itself and the actual incremental cost to build more hulls without worrying about the sunk research costs. Really, the R & D should be separated from the production cost to get rid of the odd incentives to truncate production of "too expensive" ships and build a "new and cheaper" vessel that uses the exact same technology.

What's the decent interval before Son of Zumwalt is proposed?

The Army We Wish To Have

Remember how the Left complained loudly (do they have any other way?) that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated the obvious when he said "we go to war with the Army we have and not the Army we wish we had" when the question was whether our Army was too small to win in Iraq?

Mind you, that complaint was part of an effort to argue for an unneeded draft to damage the party in power rather than an effort to win the war.

But I digress (as I can!)

Well, guess what size Army our civilian leaders wish to have in the future? One that could shrink to 420,000 and only 24 maneuver brigades.

Yeah, that's a mistake, as O'Hanlon writes:

In my new book, "The Future of Land Warfare" (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), I attempt to debunk the new conventional wisdom (which began with the Obama administration but also permeates thinking beyond): Messy ground operations can be relegated to the dustbin of history.

To be fair, before the Iraq War Rumsfeld believed that numbers of ground troops could be dramatically reduced by technology that replaces troops to win ground wars.

We learned that was not quite true enough for counter-insurgency. So now we just assume we don't need to fight any type of ground operations.

That will work out swell when the Army gets sent anyway.

The Marines should take note, because no matter how much they don't want to be a "second Army," if the Army is too small to fight a ground war, the Marines will be sent to fight no matter what the Marines have focused on.

(I was going to link to my paper, The First Gulf War and the Army's Future, which used the example of Iraq's initial invasion of Iran in 1980 to argue against reducing our Army back then, but the server that it has existed on for so many years after I stopped using that ISP was finally scrubbed or perhaps died. Pity.)

The Difference It Makes

Is the investigation into Benghazi hyper-focused on Hillary Clinton?

“This has become a partisan investigation,” Maj. Bradley Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve, told CNN. “I do not know the reason for the hyper-focus on Hillary Clinton.”

Podliska, who spent 10 months as an investigator for the Republican-led panel, says he was fired in June for resisting pressure to focus his efforts on Clinton.

Not to sound like Captain Obvious, but since Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State at the time and since it has been revealed that she used a private email server without turning over all her emails, isn't this an obvious focus for information?

President Obama says that this issue is political and of no importance:

Obama downplayed the threat to national security, and when it was pointed out that his administration has prosecuted people for having classified material on their private computers, the president said he didn't get the impression there was an intent to "hide something or to squirrel away information." He also said he was not initially aware of her use of the private email server.

Huh:

The private email server running in Hillary Rodham Clinton's home basement when she was secretary of state was connected to the Internet in ways that made it more vulnerable to hackers while using software that could have been exploited, according to data and documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Getoutahere!

So the idea that the vulnerability of Clinton's private server to foreign intelligence agencies didn't have a negative impact on our national security would have to rest on the assumption that nothing the State Department did was important to our national security. So what difference does a private server make, at this point, eh?

But it is more likely that politics has led the president to downplay the threat. After all, Hillary used that email a lot. The White House didn't know? Really? Worse, the White House didn't politely remind the Secretary of State to use government-protected emails?

What does being "initially" unaware even mean? During the first week? First month? At some point, somebody in the White House if not the Oval Office had to notice that Secretary of State Clinton was using a private email address--and not just for updates on Chelsea's wedding gown search or meeting conflicts with the secretary's yoga class schedule.

So why wouldn't the email be a focus once discovered?

I'm still not satisfied with our military's response. I think it was at a peacetime mode, possibly under pressure to act like our wars had been responsibly ended.

My concern is not nonsense. Indeed, both the CIA and Hillary Clinton's State Department marched to the sound of the guns.

And they made a difference.

UPDATE: Related (via Instapundit).

Helping Those Who Help Themselves in AFRICOM

Three hundred American troops have been ordered to Cameroon to counter Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria:

The troops will "conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations in the region," Obama said. "These forces are equipped with weapons for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security, and they will remain in Cameroon until their support is no longer needed."

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the troops would provide intelligence to a multi-national task force being set up to fight Boko Haram and composed of troops from Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Chad and Benin.

Boko Haram's morale isn't what it used to be:

In the last three weeks troops in the northeast (Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states) have inflicted several major and many minor defeats on Boko Haram. Hundreds of Boko Haram captives have been freed, largely because more troops are out searching and Boko Haram does not have enough men to defend or move their camps and their captives when troops close in. In short, the Islamic terrorists are running out of places to hide. There are fewer Boko Haram raids, especially large scale ones, and more bombings, often by suicide bombers who think they are delivering a package that is actually a remotely controlled bomb. Most Boko Haram losses are now from desertion, surrender (for amnesty) or capture. Dying for the cause is not as popular as it used to be.

See? Killing jihadis doesn't just make more jihadis. Killing them and defeating them really can discourage them and depress recruiting when the glorious caliphate doesn't look like something to be enjoyed any time soon.

It would be nice if there was some offshore support with a reaction force available in case the troops not intended for combat find themselves in combat for their own force protection.

But it is always nice to see our administration recognize that there is actually an option between doing nothing and sending several hundred thousand troops into combat.

UPDATE: The help is welcome:

Nigeria and Cameroon on Thursday welcomed a US decision to send up to 300 military personnel to Cameroon to help the regional fight against Boko Haram militants.

We will provide ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) help, which would include manned and unmanned aircraft to find and track jihadis.

Staying a Little Bit Longer

President Obama has decided to remain in Afghanistan after 2016:

President Barack Obama will keep 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office in 2017, according to senior administration officials, casting aside his promise to end the war on his watch and instead ensuring he hands the conflict off to his successor.

We'll keep 9,800 in the country until the end of 2016.

In his announcement, our president said that we would have a counter-terrorism mission and a training and advising mission.

That's good. I assume we will have an air support mission, too. Both for our troops and our allies.

It would be nice to provide logistics and air medical evacuation help, too.

Let me note my force protection worries:

If we stay, it should be with a force not only robust enough to defend itself on their bases but strong enough to keep the Afghan forces in the fight and winning.

The last thing we want is to have too few troops to keep the Taliban from defeating our allies but just enough to make a good massacre.

Our experience in Iraq should help us learn to do things right--not just make a different (and bloodier) mistake in Afghanistan.

Is it enough to have 5,500 for all the things we should do to win? Hard for me to say. But it worries me.

We should have allies who will double our commitment, I'll guess. And contractors could double that again.

And I'm not actually panicky despite the temporary loss of Kunduz to the Taliban:

Charging into Kunduz on September 28 was unusual, because it was an expensive operation in that it gets a lot of Taliban fighters killed or captured and is soon undone once the security forces send enough reinforcements to the city. And that’s what happened. It got worse when several similar attacks failed to get into the city they were after.

Unlike the loss of Ramadi that is still in enemy hands, our Afghan allies counter-attacked quickly and successfully, with our help.

Two of the subsequent failures were at Ghazni:

South of Kabul some 2,000 Taliban, coming from several different directions, tried to rush in and seize control of Ghazni city, which is about the same size as Kunduz. This attack failed with none of the Taliban groups getting any closer than five kilometers from the city. Meanwhile troops and police are still fighting Taliban in some Kunduz neighborhoods.

And at Maimana:

Some 400 kilometers northwest of Kabul over 500 Taliban attempted to charge into the city of Maimana (the capital of Faryab province and about half the size of Kunduz). The attack was repulsed with at least 20 percent of the attackers killed or wounded.

And there is this demonstration of why our air power is important:

In the south (Kandahar) the security forces detected the Taliban assembling several hundred men in a rural area of Shurabak, near the Pakistan border. Air strikes were called in, followed by a ground operation. The operations found over a hundred Taliban dead and more than fifty wounded by the attack.

Of course, the question is whether it will be enough in 2017 and not right now. If we continue to knock down the enemy while building up friendly Afghan forces, it could be enough.

As an aside, it is always nice to see that the president sees a middle ground between doing nothing and sending several hundred thousand American troops.

UPDATE: And of course, if Afghanistan is to be (another) of the administration's "great achievements" it can't go belly up before January 2017 because we left too early.

UPDATE: Our decision to stay allows NATO to decide to stay with us.

Watching Grass Grow

Iraq is on the cusp of glory at Ramadi. And the Twelfth Battle of Baiji has been fought.

At long last:

Iraqi forces have made significant advances around Ramadi, and an operation is looming to retake the city, captured by the Islamic State jihadist group in May, officers said Wednesday.

The big fanfare is underway:

"Great people, the hour of victory against the Daesh (IS) criminal gangs has come," said the Joint Operations Command for Anbar province, of which Ramadi is the capital.

Well, alrighty, then.

And at Baiji where Iraqi forces have been battling over a city and refinery (is it rubble yet?), the fight has tilted Iraq's way:

Iraqi forces and Shi'ite militia fighters recaptured most of the country’s largest oil refinery from Islamic State militants on Thursday, security officials said. ...

The refinery is a focal point in efforts to contain Islamic State and has changed hands several times since the Sunni Islamist militants swept through northern Iraq last year. Islamic State controls one-third of the territory of the country.

I actually don't know what number the Battle of Baiji has reached. But it smacks of the Isonzo River.

I'm starting to think the Iraqis should just build a new refinery further south and level the facility at Baiji.

At this rate, ISIL will die of old age.

The Axis of Reset

Reset Russia is working hard against us hand-in-hand with pre-responsible regional partner Iran. So what about our third "reset" partner Cuba?

Huh:

The head of Cuba's military recently visited Syria with soldiers, lending to speculation that Cuba may deploy ground troops in the conflict recently joined by Russia.

Bringing back the good old days of the Cold War when Cuba provided tens of thousands of troops to fight for Moscow in Angola and Ethiopia!

It's like an Axis of Reset!

UPDATE: Cuba denies it has sent troops to support Assad:

Foreign ministry official Gerardo Penalver "categorically denies and refutes the irresponsible and unfounded information regarding the supposed presence of Cuban troops in the Syrian Arab Republic," a government statement said.

That outraged denial may even be true. They may just be providing advice or training. Or maybe intelligence officers rather than troops.

And note that the report said that the Cubans are preparing to send troops and the Cubans denied that their troops are present in Syria right now.

Or maybe they are just waiting for the payoff from their own "reset" with America to afford it.

A Strongly Worded Note is Not the Solution

China will use satellites to track American aircraft carriers in order to strike them far out to sea with their anti-ship ballistic missiles. Well, yeah. So let's deal with it.

China will use something that has been around for quite a while and is no secret weapon:

In a recent issue of the Chinese-language state-run China Youth Daily newspaper, a report claims that the Gaofen-4 geostationary earth observation satellite will be launched by the end of this year with the express purpose of hunting US aircraft carriers.

Well, yeah. That's the first part of the kill chain that I describe that goes from finding our carriers and ends with impact on our carriers:

First, the carrier has to be identified far out to sea with satellites, ships or submarines, or patrol aircraft.

So that's what the Chinese are doing. My post explores points in the kill chain that we can counter to keep our carriers safe.

I think it holds up pretty well compared to a later description of the same thing by an expert.

Back to the linked article, I have no idea what to make of this criticism:

The tragedy, according to Ian Easton, a China military specialist at Project 2049 Institute, is that China has made clear its intention to target US carrier groups with ballistic missiles.

“Yet the Obama administration chose not to issue a diplomatic demarche or raise the issue with [Chinese President Xi Jinping] at the White House,” Easton said.

Huh? What's the point of a protest? China does lots of things to build up their military as many nations do. They aren't going to cancel this system because we protest, and our failure to protest does not legitimize what is inherently a legitimate use of state power.

I don't have to like what China is doing. I certainly want to counter it. But protesting what China is building is kind of pointless and would just make us look weak when China naturally ignores us.

Better to say nothing and quietly deploy anti-satellite weapons.

And demote our carriers from its top billing as a sea control platform (which is different than its power projection role).

Still a Bridge Too Far

Is the big push enabled by the Russian intervention really going to be aimed at Aleppo? I still think it is a bridge too far.

News reports say that Assad will make a big effort to advance on Aleppo backed by Russian air power and the Shia foreign legion recruited in Iran:

The visit [of Iranian legislators], led by the chairman of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, came as Iranian troops prepared to bolster a Syrian army offensive that two senior officials told Reuters would target rebels in Aleppo.

The attack, which the officials said would be backed by Russian air strikes, underlined the growing involvement in the civil war of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's two main allies[.]

Are these Iranian "troops"--as in part of their armed forces or Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards)? Or are they volunteers recruited in Iran? The former is a bigger deal even if they number only in the low hundreds to act as shock troops to spearhead an offensive.

This puzzles me. I just don't think Assad has the troops to hold his Alawite homeland and Damascus, let alone Aleppo.

In July 2012, I judged Aleppo was a bridge too far. Later, I also wrote that even if Assad could take the city, he lacked the troops to defend it. Assad's troop situation has gotten much worse since then.

I still feel that way. Even if the small Russian air contingent and the small Iranian shock troop contingent can take the wreckage of Aleppo, how does Assad hold it? My pre-Russian intervention judgment stands.

I've read that many of Assad's supporters are extremely anxious to rescue Assad's supporters holed up in the Aleppo area. I guess I didn't blog about that. I meant to.

Assad's forces under siege in Idlib province managed to escape a month ago. But the people trapped in Aleppo can't make a break for it. They need to be rescued.

So it makes far more sense to me for an operation aimed at Aleppo to be a rescue effort to evacuate the troops and civilians still trapped up there and then retreat back to the Core Syria further south.

But even this isn't going to be a cake walk:

American-made anti-tank missiles are turning the tide against the Syrian regime and allied forces in a major battle in the country's centre and northwest, rebel groups said Tuesday.

Non-Islamist opposition factions say they are using the US-made TOW missiles to halt a Syrian army advance that is backed by Russian air strikes in the provinces of Hama and Idlib.

Assad probably has little choice but to try to rescue his people in Aleppo. If they don't survive, he might not.

UPDATE: This pending offensive is getting a lot of hype (and let me just say that I hate The Daily Beast website which seems to have a limitless way of locking up my computer):

At least 1,000 troops from Iran and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah were massing north of the key Syrian city of Aleppo in preparation for an attack on the rebels there, a U.S. senior defense official told The Daily Beast. The coming offensive—what the U.S. military called a “major push”—would be the largest Iranian intervention in Syria since the war began and the strongest sign yet of an increasingly coordinated military campaign by three of the United States’ military foes—Syria, Russia, and Iran.

A thousand men "gather." It's a bit much to say they are "massing." This just isn't a large force. Sure, it is meant to be the spearhead behind which less committed Syrian troops can follow, but still, this doesn't seem as big as it appears to be--or needs to be.

And what will Hezbollah do? I thought they'd given their two-weeks notice to quit the shock troop role. Will they man newly acquired tanks to avoid infantry casualties? If so, watch out for those TOW missiles that will make short work of the old tanks they have.

UPDATE: Russia doesn't want to fight a war in Syria, as I've been saying:

Putin certainly realizes that some 30 Russian combat jets won't be able to change the course of the war, and allow Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces to win. His apparent goals are more modest: to show all players that they will not be able to unseat Assad by force; to help cement the Syrian government's grip on the territory it controls; and to foster political talks that could allow Moscow to protect its interests in the region.

Another key task for Putin is bring Moscow and Washington together in a security dialogue, which he hopes would make Russia appear as an equal and eventually lead to improved ties with the West that were wrecked by the Ukraine crisis.

I really think that Putin is counting on President Obama and his Secretary of Flexibility Kerry to rescue him and give him a victory at a signing ceremony.

A successful rescue mission at Aleppo followed by some deal with America that saves the Assad regime (even if Assad takes a public demotion the way Putin did with his hand puppet President Medvedev for a while) in the northwest corner of Syria would provide the victory on the cheap that Putin would like.

I say bid Putin to have fun storming the castle and let Russia fail and pay the price of failing.

UPDATE: The offensive is on. The foreign support is a small part of the offensive:

"This is the promised battle," a senior government military source said of the offensive backed by hundreds of Hezbollah and Iranian forces which he said had made some gains on the ground.

It was the first time Iranian fighters had taken part on such a scale in the Syrian conflict, he said, although their numbers were modest compared to the army force. "The main core is the Syrian army," the source said.

How many of the more numerous Syrian forces are really capable of offensive action and how many are simply capable of holding ground gained by others?

UPDATE: I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is the real objective of the offensive pushing toward Aleppo:

Troops are also trying to advance to the east of Aleppo towards Kweires military airport, aiming to break a siege on the base by Islamic State and other insurgents, the UK-based Observatory said.

Supporters of Assad can take civilian casualties, as long as others pay the price. But abandoning other supporters is another matter altogether.