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.

News flash: ETTs have a really hard job

This video, courtesy of Christian Bleuer at Ghosts of Alexander, helps to illustrate exactly how difficult it is to be an Embedded Tactical Trainer in Afghanistan. Some language NSFW.

Why Afghanistan is important: flashback to April 2007

UPDATE: This post has been linked and excerpted by John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review. Brown is a PD expert and former Foreign Service officer who is now associated with Georgetown University. This is kind of a thrill for me, because — even though I know he’s just Googling “public diplomacy” and then linking to all the new results, probably — at my first job in DC I read his listserv/blog (cited as one of the 10 Best Blogs of ‘06 by U.S. News and World Report’s David Kaplan) every single day. Funny how things loop back around like that.

There’s a whole lot to write about lately — mostly on the President’s announcement of a new Af-Pak strategy, some ongoing and complementary discussion of CT vs. COIN, risk-avoidance in strategy and tactics, and a weirdly unfocused Andrew Exum on an anti-safe havens approach, but also a really, really bad article in Armed Forces Journal (inexplicably, the headliner of the April issue!) on conflict avoidance as national security strategy — but I’ve been dealing with computer issues for much of the last two nights (my usual reading and writing time), so my energy and patience are waning right now.

I’m hoping I can get the ol’ analytical juices flowing with a little stroll down memory lane — I’m going to post a few excerpts of a piece I wrote almost two years ago for a blog called the Weekend Economist, in which I responded to another writer’s argument about the relative perceived strategic importance of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gunmen raid police academy in Lahore

It’s being reported this morning that a police training center in Lahore has been raided by gunmen disguised as police officers. There was an 8-hour standoff, and the death toll currently stands at 27 (with more than triple that number wounded). This is significant for a number of reasons, but here’s two: 1) this attack took place in the generally placid city of Lahore, in Punjab — not in the Northwest Frontier Provinces, the Swat Valley, Baluchistan, or the FATA, and 2) this is the second time in about six months that massed bands of militants have assaulted a target using military-style tactics and then engaged with security forces in an attempt to hold ground.

Brookings Stability Operations event

This afternoon I attended a panel discussion held at the Brookings Institution that focused on the new Army field manual for stability operations, FM 3-07. The discussion was moderated by Janine Davidson, and the panel was composed of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (and former president of the Center for a New American Security) Michele Flournoy, Brookings Director of Foreign Policy Studies and reputedly soon-to-be-announced U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual, and LTG William Caldwell, commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center.

UPDATE: CSPAN has the video up here. My question is around the 1:22 mark if you’re interested. My voice doesn’t sound like that in real life, I promise.

I might write more on this later, but for now I’ll just post what I wrote in the comments section at Abu Muqawama regarding the question I asked USD Flournoy:

New book in the mail

Fresh out of the mailbox!

If I end up falling back into my habit of infrequent posting any time soon, then this time it won’t be because I’m distracted by beer and basketball (like every other time). No, this time it’s different: it’s because I’m likely to end up spending the next three or four years, Roget’s dictionary close at hand, trying to get through the 209 pages of Vincent Desportes’ La Guerre Probable (The Likely War). After two weeks’ wait and twenty-odd dollars in shipping charges the book arrived in my mailbox today via Amazon.fr.