Man, I bet this guy was pissed when Randy Lerner bought the club

Birmingham ain’t that nice, but it’s got to be better than Helmland. From today’s London Times:

There are even reports of British Muslims on the battlefield, with one dead Taleban fighter in Helmland found recently sporting an Aston Villa football club tattoo.

There is some kinda crazy-ass irony to the fact that one of Villa’s managing directors is Chuck Krulak. How wild is that coincidence?

Oh yeah, and the article is worthwhile even without this little tidbit, so check it out.

“Who is Liz?”

This has nothing to do with anything, but it’s hilarious.

Sorry, but why are we still listening to Bob Kagan? (UPDATED)

I’ve had my share of complaints about Kagan in the past, but this one might take the cake. The President, we’re told, needs Ahmadinejad to win.

His extremely guarded response to the outburst of popular anger at the regime has been widely misinterpreted as reflecting concern that too overt an American embrace of the opposition will hurt it, or that he wants to avoid American “moralizing.” (Obama himself claimed yesterday that he didn’t want the United States to appear to be “meddling.”)

But Obama’s calculations are quite different. Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis.

NATO, Article 5, and resource strangulation/cyber attacks

Does it constitute shilling for a new high hit-count day if I post twice in one day for the first time in like, ever? Probably, but I’m going to do it nonetheless, if only to make Jason stop whining.

So while my more thoughtful friends and acquaintances are carrying on meaningful email dialogues and challenging me to think about putting fingers to keys on some bigger-think strategic questions, I’m going to direct you to this short piece that I saw last week about Ivo Daalder’s first trip to Europe as the U.S. ambassador to NATO.

Late comments on “Triage” and the CNAS Conference

The Center for a New American Security held its annual conference last Thursday at the Willard Hotel. The event featured GEN Petraeus as the morning keynote speaker, followed by a series of panels related to the rollout of several new policy papers. The one I’m most interested in, pretty obviously, is Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Andrew Exum, Nate Fick, Ahmed Humayun, and Dave Kilcullen. Fick and Ex participated in a panel discussion — moderated by the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, LTG (ret) David Barno — alongside noted counterinsurgency skeptic Andrew Bacevich and COL Chris Cavoli, who commanded a battalion of the 10th Mountain in RC-East in 2006-07.

Chivers takes on SFA in Afghanistan

CJ Chivers has done some outstanding reporting from Afghanistan lately, most notably his series of stories from the Korengal valley (but also on weapons accountability in the Afghan Security Forces). Now he takes on the subject of security force assistance, outlining the problems that American mentors face — both institutional and situational — in trying to stand up a capable Afghan force.

What makes this piece better than most of the media analysis on mentorship and training teams is that Chivers spent his twenties as a Marine infantry officer. You can’t miss the disdain in his tone when he describes a poor Afghan officer sheltering himself in a latrine while his men are mortared, or in this sentiment:

On patrols observed by The Times this year, many Afghan soldiers wore their equipment, remained alert, walked with weapons ready and moved by bounds across dangerous ground. These are not difficult tasks, but on patrols in past years Afghans often neglected them.

Anyway, read this piece. (And check out all the multimedia on the Times website associated with the Chivers stories — there are some amazing photos.) I’m looking forward to the thoughts of Blue and other experts on this subject.

SecArmy nominee today?

Trying out a blog post via BlackBerry, so we’ll see how this turns out.

Politico reports the following:

“President Obama today will appoint Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) as Secretary of the Army, according to an administration official.”

I’ll go ahead and note that I know basically nothing about McHugh except that he’s the ranking member on House Armed Services and Ft. Drum (home of the 10th Mountain Division) is in his district, though I’m sure this is going to be covered pretty extensively by other people today.

Sitting through a really interesting briefing by a dude from State Pol-Mil bureau about Foreign Military Finance and the 1206 program, so hopefully that will spur me to write a little bit this week and examine the way we’re building military and CT capabilities in partner nations.

PCCF and the FY10 budget request

Today the White House released the details of its FY2010 budget request, totaling $3.4 trillion. I’ll probably have more to say about the defense-related provisions of the request at some point in the future, but for right now I just want to highlight one thing: the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund.

Insurgent basketball: Gladwell on sports and asymmetric conflict

I was all girded up to write a couple thousand words on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.” I even made notes. And then I left them at work. 

So as part of my new commitment to try to write something every day (increase frequency of posts, decrease frequency of “excuses” tag), I’m just going to direct you to the article and the thread on Abu Muqawama where I got scooped in the middle of the work day. Hopefully I’ll get back to this tomorrow, because I think there’s really a lot of interesting stuff to say about this. Gladwell has really only just nibbled at the edge of this subject, but his conclusion that “effort > skill” is noteworthy.

This guy rules

I haven’t written anything in ages, and I’m leaving for Moscow in like sixteen hours and haven’t packed a stitch, so just go read this article from the 29 March New York Times Magazine about Freeman Dyson, a physicist who rules.