Since the Taliban is targeting cell towers, is anyone looking at solutions like this to provide rapid, low-fidelity fixes when a tower goes down?

The ability to rapidly deploy a cellular phone relay station, whether through the Cellular Aerostat Platform System or a smaller system, offers a compelling way for Afghan and coalition forces to demonstrate a difference between them and the Taliban: they cut off connectivity, we supply it.

No material resource provides a permanent solution against a thinking enemy. But capabilities like this, when mated to the proper operational employment, could be a valuable asset in further forcing the Taliban to suffer the public opinion consequences of disrupting a key communications link for the society. Part of that operational employment revolves around how these emergency nodes are operated and defended. If they can be used to attract other services and embedded within existing community structure to strengthen them (instead of replace them), then they could become a key rallying point.

Note again the convergence between the disaster-recovery mission of the SysAdmin force and its SSTR mission. These aren’t gold-plated, 100% solutions. These need to be cheap (so we can accept losses and not be risk-averse in our employment of them), rugged, rapidly deployable and fully transferable to local ownership and operation. Whether they should be visible is an interesting question for further discussion - how to trade off the potential rallying point against the increase vulnerability?

True or False: We Need a Wartime President. Fareed Zakaria examines the question and answers “false.”

We are in a struggle against Islamic extremism, but it is more like the cold war than a hot war—a long, mostly peacetime challenge in which a leader must be willing to use military power but also know when not to do so. Perhaps the wisest American president during the cold war was Dwight Eisenhower, and his greatest virtues were those of balance, judgment and restraint. He knew we were in a contest with the Soviet Union, but—at a time when the rest of the country was vastly inflating the threat—he put it in considerable perspective. Eisenhower refused to follow the French into Vietnam or support the British at Suez. He turned down several requests for new weapons systems and missiles, and instead used defense dollars to build the interstate highway system and make other investments in improving America’s economic competitiveness. Those are the kinds of challenges that the next president truly needs to address.

What Zakaria’s op-ed history summary of Eisenhower neglects to mention, however, was how realistically our 34th president took the prospect of nuclear war with the Soviets (a prospect that many now assume to be irrational). I was just reading Trachtenberg’s History and Strategy yesterday, and chapters 3 and 5 do an excellent job exploring the evolving discussions of nuclear strategy during the late 1940s and 1950s. It was an uncertain time and Eisenhower’s perspective and perception of the threat might surprise some with 21st Century assumptions about the unusability of nuclear weapons. Yes, Eisenhower displayed judgment and restraint, but he also took a very hard line with the Soviets. His restraints on defense spending depended on his New Look policy’s reliance on nuclear weapons - a policy that many today criticize for being unreasonably dependant on massive nuclear escalation.

So, yes, let us have balanced strategic thinking, but let us not equate “balance” with “uncontrovertial” or “easy.”

While it is hardly news to anyone who reads this blog, this quote from Gen. Mattis neatly sums up the argument against the position that we need to reset ourselves for high-intensity war after Iraq (from Barnett’s op-ed today).

Listen to Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis decry, already in late 2005 following a command tour in Iraq, the strategic mindset that suggests: ” ‘Let’s hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China 20 years from now.’ ”

Going on: “If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we’re fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, 100,000 Special Forces would be running around doing what they’re doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours.”

The fight over whether Iraq was a “one-off” aberration like Vietnam has been going on for a while already. Remember that.

Noah examines an important question - does increased military communications encourage micromanagement?

[The experience of being bombarded by emails immediately second-guessing his choice to medevac some troops] lead Boudreau to conclude that a military network’s real weak point isn’t storage capacity, or bandwidth. “There is a limit to how much a soldier on the ground can convey with the pressures of time, heat, exhaustion, and possibly enemy fire bearing down,” he writes. “Consequently, any tactical picture formed in remote command posts can’t help but obscure the nuances of the peculiar scenarios that patrolling soldiers face on the ground.”

Network theory holds that the network gets stronger with every additional node. And there are countless thousands of examples of that being proven out on military. But on the battlefield, the inverse may sometimes be true, as well.

It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the organizational adaptation to that technology. Just because you can contact someone doesn’t mean you necessarily should, nor does it alleviate the importance of training forces in command-by-influence.

Put another way:

For the monitored, time spent quantifying efforts, writing situation reports or reporting to higher command is time spent off delegated tasks. Furthermore, persistent monitoring reduces the risks taken by subordinates, reducing their discretion and pushing up many decisions once made at their level.

…Now that senior leaders can nanomanage a distant action, when everyone rushes to the sounds of the guns, who is planning, who is thinking, who is directing what will occur when those guns go silent?

Part of the whole power of the IT revolution, as applied to business management, has been the ability to gather data automatically without burdening individuals with the task of personally answering data calls and queries. When considering how to organize and train a network-enabled military, we need to remember this.

UPDATE: John Robb weighs in with his take on the article that kicked all of this off.

An almost throw-away line that encapsulates an entire argument:

China doesn’t face supply threats or risks, but price risks.

Okay, so this story turns out to be not so much with the truth.

Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident.

Mark has a great post over at Zenpundit that looks at a Nagl[1] review that addresses the big themes of 21st Century grand strategy.

Nagl:

In the twenty-first century, wars are not won when the enemy army is defeated on the battlefield; in fact, there may not be a uniformed enemy to fight at all. Instead, a war is only won when the conditions that spawned armed conflict have been changed.

[1] Readers probably already know, but Nagl has left the Army and has joined the up-and-coming Center for a New American Security.

A quick geeky post about portfolio management [1] thinking. I guess this is my version of a casual Friday?

Last night on CNN’s Situation Room (transcript), we get this summary of the Future Combat System’s (FCS) non-line-of-sight cannon (NLOS-C):

I get it that this is the best damn howitzer money can buy. But $10 million, is it worth it when look at all the other things you have to buy?

In other words, given the cost constrains we face, is this the best way to spend your limited resources. Mathematically, it’s equivalent to the knapsack problem (a more light-hearted explaination). Strategically, it’s about aligning your resources with your ends. In both cases, the tricky part is defining your ends (in a decision analysis framework to support PfM, this equates to the challenge of defining your objective function).

MG Charlie Cartwright replies:

Well I guess I would ask you when I only put two soldiers in harm’s way and double survivability versus five soldiers in harm’s way, that’s a pretty good option for the American public.

In operations research speak, he means that we ought to include the percent of soldiers placed at risk in the analysis’ measure of effectiveness (MoE).

Jamie McIntyre:

But the question is, are this better, cheaper technologies to hit over-the-horizon targets than a 27-ton tracked vehicle the size of a tank? Why not more unmanned attack planes. They put no one at risk and are several million dollars cheaper.

Given the above framework, UAVs would seem to dominate NLOS-C. But now we get an additional criteria for the objective function:

MG Cartwright:

What [NLOS-C] gives them is the organic piece to that squad and platoon that’s down there in the fight.

So now organic fires are part of the objective function. Of course, this flies in face of the capabilities-based assessment philosophy that values solution-agnostic acquisitions. If one wanted to keep playing the game, he would ask what other solutions organic to the squad or platoon can deliver non-line-of-sight precision strikes.

[1] Portfolio managment (PfM) was one of those fads that hit DoD during Rumsfeld’s tenure. The movement created a string of directives, most prominently DoD 8115.01.

LA Times: McCain and Obama camps are open to Gates.

Could just be the campaigns looking to draft behind Gates’ popularity. But when one combines the possibity of an extended term with Gates’ track record on accountability, this starts to get really interesting.

Yes, yes, I know that the cynics say this changes nothing. But possibilities abound, especially when we consider how this momentum could be used to influence the selection of the successor to Gates.

Art has an excellent post up discussing the counter-intuitive trade-offs created by rapid innovation.

Sometimes waiting (and investing) is better than charging ahead, using up all of your cash on old, dumb, slow methods that you know will be a day late and a dollar short.

Go read it. It’s worth your time.