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.”