America's Light Footprint Era (Revised)

Regarding the revision, kindly see the note at the end of this post.


Zenpundit's Mark Safranski, who read the tea leaves correctly about the limitations of POPCOIN (population-centric counterinsurgency) tactics in Afghanistan, has, I believe, done it again in his latest post, The Tip of a Shadowy Spear . If you want to know what the newly-minted U.S. counterterrorism strategy will look like on the military end, and how the newest phase of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is shaping up, read Mark's essay.

Mark concludes with the observation, "America is headed into the Light Footprint Era, ready or not."

The light footprint will require heavy reliance on special forces and thus, the title of his post. What happens, however, when the tip of the military's spear (special forces) becomes part of the shaft, as the lighter U.S. footprint will demand? Mark's analysis isolates the major downsides of the approach and in this passage raises questions that extend far beyond battle tactics:

Thirdly, an emphasis on a special forces dominant force structure may have the unintended consequence of causing the executive branch civilian officials to move even further away from strategic thinking and incline them more toward reactive, tactical, retaliation.

Misuse of special forces is the American historical norm. Special forces are so well suited for “emergency use” that they are frequently employed for every “priority” mission except those that are intended to have a strategic effect, even when a regular military unit of combat infantry is more than adequate for the task at hand (Or for that matter, using non-military options!) [...]

Although the writing is primarily addressed to the defense policy community and makes use of military terms, the general reader will only need to surmount a few acronyms to understand the ideas put forth. ("AVF" simply means an all-volunteer force, as the U.S. military has today.) But because Mark invokes two terms (FID and mass) that have more than one interpretation (e.g., different branches of the U.S. military have different standardized definitions of what constitutes mass) and branch into somewhat complex concepts, I wrote to ask that he explain what he meant by the terms in the context of his discussion. He replied:

I meant "mass" in the simple terms of large, conventional, deployments as we have in Afghanistan and had in Iraq. [...]

Foreign Internal Defense (FID) are the training and advisory missions and military aid programs extended to other countries facing insurgencies. US special forces, usually Green Berets, teach, train and advise allied armies and police in unconventional warfare, COIN and special forces tactics but do not take a leading combat role as in COIN campaigns. FID missions are quiet, cheap and small in terms of personnel. COIN campaigns feature US forces doing the above but taking a major combat role until the allied forces can assume the burden themselves (Vietnamization).

COIN has a checkered and fiercely debated historical record. Why do we keep doing it? Because the alternative at the moment of decision is usually the collapse of the ally and that involves a hard strategic assessment of the ally's worth, which seldom happens. Easier to punt and play for time.

NOTE -- 2:45 PM ET

Mark doesn't read tea leaves of course, nor (to my knowledge) does he have a functioning crystal ball; he does have excellent powers of observation, which led him to spot several trends that have building for many months and note how these were starting to converge. The result in my opinion is the clearest picture available to the general reader of how U.S. warfare is evolving to meet the challenges of the present era.

Yet the picture has so many wider implications that it's almost impossible to resist the temptation to use it as a springboard for many policy and philosophical discussions. Mark himself, as I indicate above, didn't resist reading in a few implications. My response to the essay was to ruminate so much on the wider implications that my original title for this post was, "East of the Danube" lol. (Don't ask.)

I finally chopped down my discussion to one paragraph, which I've now decided to delete even though I'm fond of it and will probably re-deploy it in a future essay. I did this because Mark has written an important essay, one that deserves to be studied on its own merits before hanging all number of glittering ornaments on it.

Could a dragged-out economic crisis lead to world war?

I've been sitting on Stephen Diamond's November 6 essay, The Income Statement v. the Balance Sheet: Will the Economic Crisis Unravel the Long Peace? because I planned to write a book in reply but before the days turn into months here are my thoughts about his concern.

My problem with his discussion is that he's not factoring in the real story behind the economic collapse. In this he's not alone; only a virtual handful of Americans, most of whom relocated to Canada or Switzerland when Nixon shut the gold window, are aware that since the 1970s the major industry in the United States has been U.S. dollar sales to central banks around the world.

The industry is untaxed and run by people who are not elected and thus, are immune to the wrath of voters. This has led to great abuse of the U.S. dollar. Yet the ability of the industry to magically generate billions of dollars without generating runaway inflation insulated the American economy from the worst effects of the onslaught by Japan, Inc. and later from China, Inc. The downside is that the U.S. government's heavy reliance on the industry led to the horribly destructive policy that perpetual debt was highly profitable.

It was only a matter of time, however, before U.S. dollar hegemony would be challenged, which led to the joke that Saddam Hussein signed his death warrant when he conspired to accept euros in payment for Iraqi oil.

The worst downside of the U.S. dollar industry was that it came to substitute for the innovation that drives the kind of technological revolutions that Steve mentions in his essay, and which allows capitalism to function in a healthy fashion. "King Dollar," as Larry Kudlow likes to call it, became a king with feet of clay. The dollar ceased representing the hard work, ingenuity, and freedom of the American people. It became a symbol for a kind of extortion deal, in which countries that could ill afford it had to keep a large amount of their hard currency reserves in U.S. dollars if they wanted to buy OPEC oil and virtually all other key commodities.

The deal began to collapse under the weight of its unfairness, with many oil producers accepting barter or non-dollar payments from the poorest nations by the 1990s, and when a resurgent Russian energy industry challenged OPEC's power.

Yet the more the USD industry came under pressure, the more other nations were expected to carry an ever-leapfrogging amount of U.S. debt. There was no way the situation could continue indefinitely and it finally crashed with the bursting of the last financial-markets bubble.

I mentioned the key role of the USD industry in some of the earliest posts on this blog and warned that hard economic times were ahead for Americans as the industry ran into more and more obstacles. Yet I also noted that once America had gone through a painful readjustment the society would regain its health -- a true health.

The other side of the picture is that some carrying of U.S. debt by other nations is not an unfair burden because it's a de facto tax. Being the world's policeman is an expensive enterprise. That long peace Steve talks about has been mostly courtesy of Uncle Sam the Supercop.

If some readers shriek, 'Supercop? What about Darfur?' -- yes, what about Darfur? The USA wasn't going to lead the charge into Sudan because it was already under fire from almost the entire world for the Iraq invasion. But when we asked the African Union to take the lead with Darfur, then came the rattling of the begging bowl, hemming and hawing because no African leader wanted to a invade a Muslim nation, etc. etc. They wanted the USA to play the fool again, so they could blame all the downsides of an invasion on Uncle Sam.

The downside to weaning the world from American military protection is the specter of mushrooming small wars that could touch off the kind of situation that worries Steve. There is no easy reply to his worry. But the developing world and 'emerging' economies, in particular BRIC nations, are relatively untouched by the economic crises that spun out from the collapse of financial markets in September 2008. Russia has big economic problems, as does China, but so far these are unrelated to the collapse. That situation would change if the crisis continues to drag out.

Again, I think the underlying factor in the economic crisis is a currency crisis. I suspect the latter is the real reason for the hesitation of so many U.S. banks and corporations to part with their big cash positions. If I'm right, then quantitative easing measures won't work. Neither will nationalization of the banks.

Bottom line is that there's nothing spookier, as far as banks and big corporations are concerned, than a looming seismic shift in the international currency regime.

If you ask, 'What seismic shift? -- ah, that's just it! There is no shift, just a lot of shifting from foot to foot and everyone asking everyone else, 'So, any news about the seismic shift in the currency regime?'

War, not terrorism

Two reports on the Tuesday bridge bombing in Iraq show why the war has been so hard to follow from news accounts. Watch carefully; don't blink:

Insurgents hit a bridge north of Baghdad on Tuesday, using a suicide bomber at the wheel of an oil tanker truck to destroy the span, plunging cars and people into the canal waters below. Ten people are reported dead and six more missing.

The Thiraa Dijla bridge in Taji links Baghdad to Mosul, and was reportedly a strategic asset to the US, which relied on it for supply transport.

I took those quotes from a compilation of reports of the bridge bombing on the Iraq Slogger site. Now here's a discussion of the bridge bombing from Bill Roggio's Tuesday Iraq Report posted at the Weekly Standard:

Yesterday, Multinational Forces Iraq announced the start of two major operations --Phantom Strike and Lightning Hammer. Operation Phantom Strike “consists of simultaneous operations throughout Iraq focused on pursuing remaining AQI terrorists and Iranian-supported extremist elements,” while Operation Lightning Hammer is directed at al Qaeda in Iraq and allied insurgent groups that escaped Baqubah and are organizing north of the city in the Diyala River Valley.

These operations are the continuation of the Baghdad Security Plan and Phantom Thunder, the operations in Baghdad and the Belts that established a security presence in areas from which Iraqi and Coalition forces were absent throughout 2006.

In a response to Lightning Hammer, al Qaeda in Iraq is attempting to disrupt Coalition supply lines. A suicide bomber detonated a fuel tanker on the Thiraa Dijla Bridge in Taji. [...] The bridge, which was heavily damaged, spans a canal and serves as a vital link from Taji to Diyala province, as well as from Baghdad to Mosul. U.S. and Iraqi forces have been using Taji as a staging point.

While the full scope of Lightning Hammer, which consists of elements of two Iraqi divisions, four U.S. infantry brigades and a U.S. combat air brigade, has yet to be determined, the operations against al Qaeda and the Shia terror cells have picked up the pace over the past week.

Attacking the Iranian-Backed Shia terror cells
The announcement for Operation Phantom Strike made clear that the Iranian-backed elements of the Mahdi Army, as well as the Qods Force-created Special Groups terror cells, are major targets. Since the announcement of Phantom Strike, Iraqi and U.S. troops have hit these Iranian-backed groups especially hard in Baghdad and Najaf, the two strongholds of Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army.

Read more.

City-based warfare creates need for decentralized police and redundant critical services. Do we have the will to carry out the programs?

"The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city."
--John Robb

ZenPundit highlights John Robb's The Coming Urban Terror. ZenPundit rightly points out that "Network theory is one of the key concepts for the intelligent public to understand for the 21st century."

Robb's piece is very scary stuff but he also discusses practical countermeasures:

In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services -- the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis -- could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid -- at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.

Similarly, cities may combat networked gangs by decentralizing their own security.[...]

Robb's advice is not new (see Annlee Hines's Planning for Survivable Networks) and the ideas he covers have gained much ground since 9/11. However, many US city governments are stretched to the budget limit, and have put off repairs to basic infrastructure systems. So I think a lot of political will needs to be mustered before US city governments embrace Robb's advice.

The question is how to muster the will. Since the 1970s appeals to civic responsibility have largely taken the form of helping the disadvantaged, supporting diversity, and protecting the Earth's environment. Even in the post-9/11 era, I don't think civic appeals relating to defense issues have gained much ground outside the military milieu.

I wonder how much time US public schools give to teaching the importance of national defense.