In today’s LA Times, Max Boot has an op-ed advocating for the creation of a “Department of Peace… so that we can be better prepared for the aftermath of future military operations.” Other steps Boot advocates include:

[President Bush] needs to re-create the defunct U.S. Information Agency, which was folded into the State Department in 1999, to wage the battle of ideas against Islamist extremists. He needs to create a federal police force, possibly within the U.S. Marshals Service, that can be dispatched to enforce the law in lawless lands. He needs to beef up the “expeditionary” capacity in other civilian branches of government, ranging from the Treasury to the Agriculture Department, so that they can augment the efforts of our soldiers.

And he needs to better integrate the civilian and military branches of government so that they can function more smoothly together than they have in Afghanistan or Iraq. (The Center for Strategic and International Studies has come up with some useful proposals for aligning interagency operations, plans and budgets under a strengthened National Security Council.)

While these thin op-ed recommendations barely scratch the surface (for example, is the U.S. Marshals Service the best place to place a force that could be deployed overseas? Would it have the language skill and cultural knowledge necessary? For that matter, is it a question of enforcing law or is it a question of providing personal security?), they illustrate how OIF has become the forcing function for adapting the federal government to stabilization missions. We’ll see more of this., because as Boot argues “if we’re going to do nation building in the future (and we are - witness calls for intervention in Somalia and Sudan), we have to get it right.”

Excellent article today examining CENTCOM’s efforts in the Horn of Africa.

Chief Ali Waberi sat on a cot draped in mosquito netting and told Budd how much the United States is needed in Djibouti.
“Our only hope is God, and you guys,” he said through the interpreter, Jafar Jama.

Sunlight streamed through gaps in the wooden boards. Flies were so thick that the old man handed his visitor a homemade fan to chase them off.
Then the chief expressed his disappointment.

“When the U.S. arrived here, we had big expectations. For 100 years, we’ve been praying for Americans to come over here,” Waberi said. “Fortunately, they’re here today.”

But, Waberi said, “it looks like the benefits are going toward the urban people rather than the villagers.”

This dispair and this hope speak to the fundamental dynamics of the Long War (and, ultimately, to all the non-military aspects of it).

The same day he visited Waberi, Budd made a stop in the village of Nagad. On his way back to the car, a young man he’d never met approached Budd. He told the agent the village needed to corral its goats and sheep. Could he help with that?

Budd introduced himself to the man, then offered a question instead of an answer.

“Do you understand what my role is?” he asked.

He had Jama, the interpreter, explain that he didn’t have the authority to carry out favors like that, but he would appreciate residents staying alert and getting in touch if they saw suspicious activity.

Budd delivered the message gently, with a handshake. “We’ll see you again,” he said.

We ought to be able to say yes to these sorts of requests and then be able to follow through on them. The military receives many of these requests, but that doesn’t mean we need to build this capability into the military. Why can’t we have USAID or State Dept. or NGO representatives with the military liason as he travels from camp to camp? We need a wider spectrum of our national power being brought to bear on these areas.

It’s tough to tell whether the United States is winning this quiet war and preventing a full-blown conflict. Sometimes, the victories are small.

Mouusi Abi is an example.

Like half the working-age population of Djibouti, the 29-year-old father of two is unemployed. He lost his job with an oil company in March, but since September, he has stayed busy helping a group of Navy Seabees construct a school bathroom in his neighborhood.

Abi simply showed up one day, with passable English that allowed him to converse with the 10-man crew from Port Hueneme, Calif. He totes heavy bags of cement and mortar and shoos away children who ask the Americans for water or throw pebbles over the fence.

It isn’t a paying gig, but Abi hopes his help might lead to a job on base. For the U.S. military, Abi is a success - for his loyalty, not his lifting.

Abi has become a fan - and defender - of the Seabees.

Motioning to the prayer tower of a nearby mosque, Abi said the imam there doesn’t like Americans working in the area, and he made those feelings public.

So Abi and fellow members of the neighborhood council visited the imam.

“They help us, and they help our children,” Abi said they told the Muslim cleric. They asked him to keep his opinions to himself, and it seems to have worked: Abi said they haven’t heard anything from the imam since.

This ought to be a paying gig for Abi. If he is offering his labor, then it seems only fair that he be paid. Again, the source of that funding probably shouldn’t be the already over-scheduled DoD. Let’s get State into the fight.

Budd, the agent with the Navy’s investigative service, worries that his friendly village visits spread false hope rather than defuse terrorism.

This is the ticking clock on all of the American efforts. If hopes prove false, then the ground will have been prepared for those who seek to prey upon failed dreams with promises of anachronistic utopias.

Been picking a bit through Dreaming 5GW. Lots of thoughts that I haven’t been keeping up with, so I latch onto the margins. This bit, for example:

If a natural defense against potential 4GW character assassination campaigns has naturally arisen, i.e., secrecy — which we have also seen much of in the George W. Bush administration, to preempt potential 4GW campaigns against the White House — then we must wonder if attempts at secrecy to combat 4GW in politics are early examples of an emergent 5GW tactic arising to combat the more prevalent dynamic of 4GW.

While secrecy may be a natural response, it does not prove a successful defense against 4GW style threats. A stronger defense would be radical transparency, an idea that Robb explored last month. Secrets will be found out, and even if they aren’t, opponents could attack one’s character with lies and distoritions. The only way to truly evicerate such attacks is to already be transparent, allowing third parties to independently varify the absurdity of the attempts to pillor your record. After all, the problem is rarely the actual act that precipitated the scandel, it is the resulting cover-up that turns wrong-doing into a full-blown scandel.

Folks may notice a few new additions to the rolls. I’ve been reading Matt’s work at Mountainrunner ever since this great post on 4GW and it was long past due to add a link. Same goes for Shloky and Henrik’s Draconian Observations.

Stratfor had a good article a few days back regarding Chavez’s latest nationalization push. While certain to shrink the already unbalanced Venezuelan economy, this move indicates how dropping oil prices (combined with stagnent Venezuelan production) drives the state’s need to find new revenue sources. In a key summary: “Venezuela’s economic situation is decidedly less than sound. With more than half of the government’s budget heavily dependent on oil, Venezuela is extremely sensitive to even relatively minor shifts in crude prices… With crude prices dropping, increased competition from the Saudis and Chavez’s mismanagement and underdevelopment in the oil sector, Venezuela is in a difficult spot.”

The mismanagement and underdevelopment of Venezuelan oil infrastructure must be emphasized. The state cannot even meet its OPEC quota and, due to Chavez’s international spending sprees, the cash from the past few years of booming prices has already been squandered without necessary infrastructure investments.

Paul Cella has an article today on TCS asking how we can force insurgent forces to give us battle. His reasoning is as follow:

…our enemy will not fight. He avoids battle like few adversaries we have come to grips with before.
I say that one of our strategies in this war should be to maneuver our enemies into a real battle, or series of them.
…In many ways his weaknesses are our strengths, and ours his. Thus, as one of our overwhelming strengths is military might, we must set our minds upon the question of how we can force him to give us battle.

Cella falls into a trap that has caught many others. The reasoning goes as follows. If we could just force the enemy to commit himself to a decisive battle, then we could demolish him once and for all and finally go home. Like Foreman looking for that one KO punch again Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle, the US spent much of the Vietnam War looking for the chance to bring first the Vietcong and then the North Vietnamese to decisive battle. In both cases, that moment never materialized the way the US or Foreman expected it to.

Instead of trying to get our enemy to fight us the way we’d like them to, we ought to be probing the enemy for weaknesses which we can then exploit to disrupt his cohesion and create non-cooperative centers of gravity. Cella touches on this when he speaks of trying to “provoke the enemy to recklessness,” but he can still only think in terms of climatic battles. He only seeks to provoke the enemy’s recklessness in order to “drive him en masse into the field of battle, and keep him there… Once this is done, I think our military forces will be eminently capable of delivering him savage repulses, and pursuing these to resounding victories against him.”

Cella gets close to something actually useful when he speaks of attacking our adversaries minds. By getting “a better handle on the enemy’s inherent mental vulnerabilities… we [can] discover his points of psychological pressure, the advantages he presents to us by virtue of his own character…” The problem is, he offers no insights into how such advantages are discovered or exploited. Contrast this with the detailed descriptions and assessments of Muckian’s article.

Cella’s article illustrates the pitfalls of remaining devoted to the dream of a decisive battle. Anyone who persists in searching for a heroric final clash will be a pawn in the hands of even a medicore guerilla. We can never force an adversary to play to our strengths. We can, however, adapt ourselves to exploit an aversaries’ weakness. Understanding this is a first step in adapting to reality, which is a prerequisite for useful strategic thought.

Wretchard and Robb have already commented on Martin Muckian’s “Structural Vulnerabilities of Networked Insurgencies” in the latest issue of Parameters. If you haven’t already done so, I highly encourage you to check it out.

One of the key points Muckian makes is that networked insurgencies do not necessarily have strong political cohesion.

As long as the network confronts issues that are within the shared story of the narrative, it can maintain its unity. If issues outside the narrative arise, however, such as the elections or an agenda for the future of Iraq, the network loses its cohesion as groups respond according to their own ideology. The network may be capable of reaching a consensus, but this takes time. This disjointedness demonstrates that the political cohesion of a networked insurgency is directly vulnerable in a way the Maoist revolutionaries were not.

These shared narratives and doctrine represent the schwepunkt of the insurgents’ orientation. In order to disrupt this,

Attack the narrative by forcing the insurgency to respond to issues that are outside its scope—this can disrupt or even fracture the movement as each group responds to the issue according to its own ideology. Ideological differences are a primary cause of fracturing within networked groups. A counterinsurgency should take every opportunity to disrupt its adversary by promoting internal dissension.

Muckian is on the right track here. He sets the proper context. Building on earlier work that examined the difference between Maoist insurgencies and the current Iraqi insurgency, Muckian takes the next step of analyzing the vulnerabilities of the Iraqi form of insurgency. Some of his specific recommendations need further development, as Robb pointed out in his post. For example, Robb criticizes Muckian for recommending that COIN forces directly attack the IT infrastructure of insurgents, since this same infrastructure is also used for legimiate economic activity. Instead of attacking the infrastructure, COIN forces ought to use the IT infrastructure to disrupt and confuse the insurgents’ orientation.

Came across an article I clipped two weeks ago from the WSJ regarding DoD efforts to reduce oil consumption. A few points:

First, “…more than half of the fuel consumed in combat theaters is used not by front-line soldiers but by supply convoys…” which gets into the importance of mobile, renewable power generaters, as I’ve discussed, especially when engaged in long-term stabilization or COIN missions.

Second, I was surprised to learn that “Four Air Force bases rely entirely on renewable energy for power, while several others use a combination of solar, wind and land gas production for power.”

While these examples do not address the biggest oil thirsts, such as aircraft or tanks, they illustrate ongoing innovation.

DEPSECDEF Gordon England told the House Budget Committee yesterday that the 2007 supplemental would be the last, as DoD’s FY08 budget would incorporate costs for OIF and OEF.

“In ‘08, there’s not a plan to have a supplemental,” England said.
Lawmakers in both parties have criticized the administration for funding the war through such requests, bypassing normal budgetary review and accountability.

And thus the crunch will continue. Defense spending may increase in FY08, but I doubt it’ll increase by more than $100 billion (the size of the 2007 supplemental), meaning that in absolute terms the amount of money being spent on defense will go down. The trade-offs between modernization and near-term adaptation will become more severe.

CSM had an excellent article yesterday on how the US is deferring war costs. Estimating the costs of the Long War is hard because DoD has funded much of the war through budget supplementals. These emergency supplementals receive less scrutiny and are not included in the federal budget (meaning that these funds are excluded from normal debt calcuations). This means that while much of the money does go to the actual costs of OEF and OIF, some other items on the services wish-lists have slipped in too. For example, CFR has examined the most recent supplemental and found it includes several F-35s and $1.2 billion in basic research for the Air Force.

Funding the war this way has helped DoD avoid making some truly hard, strategic choices between buying its dream modernizations programs (be they DD(X), FCS or the F-22) and adapting to the counterinsurgency/stabilization missions it faces today. It also has helped the administration avoid discussing the real costs of the wars. As Stephen Biddle argues, “it’s disingenuous of the administration to claim we have no idea what Iraq needs will be and so we can’t budget for them.”

Legislative folks have been on to this for a while, but with the 110th Congress entering with a Democratic majority, there has been a recent eruption of press coverage on the issue. There are signs that the emergency supplementals will soon face some heightened scrutiny:

This year, the White House is expected to ask for another $100 billion in supplemental war funds, but [new chairman of the House Budget Committee] Representative [John] Spratt says he would like to get the war back on the budget since it can be argued the war is no longer an emergency.

‘Calling it an emergency means the spending does not get the scrutiny,’ he adds, because then the spending is reviewed by only one committee – House Appropriations. In addition, he says, emergency spending is exempt from caps on discretionary spending. This has prompted the military to include in the bill items that are not directly related to the war. Making the spending a part of the budget would end the practice of some members placing pet projects on a bill that must be passed, he says.

Moving war costs into the budget will accelerate pressure to arrest the growth of defense spending ushered in by 9/11, as I’ve discussed previously.

This is not to say that I think the costs of OIF and OEF will cripple the US. As the CSM article points out, while the cost of these wars nears that of the Vietnam War, we are currently paying significantly less (as a percentage of our GDP). Spending on OIF and OEF represents less than 1% of our $13 trillion GDP. Constrast this with the Korean War, which cost 14% of GDP at its peak and Vietnam, which cost 9% of GDP at its peak.