Iran war plan

The more I dealt with military officers and learned about their operational planning, the more I realized that my civilian notions of "surgical strikes" were foolish. Yet many policymakers and armchair generals like to think of low cost, low risk military operations that somehow have major strategic effects.

Danger Room has an excellent summary of Tony Cordesman's expert analysis of what a military strike at Iran's nuclear facilities would have to entail.

It's also sobering to realize that this is just the preplanned attack, which would prompt Iranian retaliation and most likely a much bigger war than we have seen in the past two decades.

analyzing the future

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra famously said.  Yet that it what the President, Congress, and many of the rest of us expect from the intelligence community. Two professors at the University of Pennsylvania take a look at how well analysts have done in their 15-year assessments, the first of which came out in 1997. They also offer suggestions for doing this difficult job a little better. A good read with useful proposals.

One of their points is that the process may be as valuable as the end product:

There is also value to conducting Global Trends exercises even if the results only minimally improve our knowledge of the future. The process of creating these reports links the intelligence community with smart outsiders -- in academia and business -- who have different perspectives on the world. The reports also force policymakers to step back from the day-to-day and think hard about big-picture trends.

I think that's part of the value of some other government studies and reports, including the National Security Strategy Report required of the President. The final document is often fuzzy, but the effort to solicit views and craft it is enormously useful for any administration.

By the way, this report appears on a new section of the already quite excellent Foreign Policy magazine site. FP has added a "National Security Channel" and some blogs, including one on the Pentagon that appears to be as newsworthy as the existing blog on the State Department, The Cable.

military officers and politics

Good for General Dempsey! The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned military officers, including retirees, to "remain apolitical."

There are legal limits on what active duty personnel can do politically: they can vote, but not endorse candidates publicly or appear in uniform at rallies. Retirees are not prohibited from openly supporting candidates, but their advocacy can be seen as institutional support.

Both parties have trotted out their four-star celebrities, with the Democrats probably doing more than the Republicans because of their perceived anti-military feelings, probably a legacy of the Vietnam war.

It's bad. It shouldn't happen, And the retirees should not politicize the military by engaging in such activities.

political conventions

I used to watch them religiously, gavel to gavel, both Republicans and Democrats.  Now, I find it's hard to develop any enthusiasm for the effort. Also, since we don't have cable and since the broadcast networks cover only an hour a night, forget it. All the good stuff can be seen on the 'Net anyway.

In those long ago days, things sometimes happened at conventions. Sometimes even the outcome wasn't clear until the votes were taken.  Now the conventions are coronation parties for the winners, with their content [usually] tightly controlled and scripted. One team, one fight, one endlessly repeated message.

It's important to remember that the Democratic and Republican parties really exist only at their quadrennial conventions. The rest of the time they are only a fundraising and publicity staff in Washington. The rest of the time they are split into 50 state parties that nominate candidates and run elections.

Given these facts, I'm surprised/appalled that there are 15,000 journalists in Charlotte trying to find news from the 5,000 delegates and their friends.

science reminder

I can't pass up a chance to urge people to read, or re-read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I've praised before as being valuable even for students of foreign policy and national security. Dan Drezner has similar words of praise for it today.

In a book published 50 years ago this year, Kuhn showed that the major sciences did not evolve according to careful logic and persuasive experimentation, but rather only after power struggles between the old order and its defenders and the challengers who sought to answer new questions and to resolve existing anomalies. He coined the phrase "paradigm shift" and used it more carefully than many since.

military moves on hold before the election

The Obama Administration is sending strong signals that it wants to avoid major military actions before the November 6 elections. Over the holiday weekend, the NY Times reported numerous steps the administration is taking to persuade Israel not to launch an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, including air defenses and a naval buildup.  At the same time, the Washington Post quoted officials suggesting that the likelihood of U.S. intervention in Syria was remote.

Neither report is surprising. No president wants the risks and distractions of military operations just before elections. Although the Romney camp seems to favor arming Syrian rebels and supporting Israel no matter what on Iran, I doubt that it wants anything to take voters' minds off the economy.

Despite the title of this site -- drawing on Henry IV's advice to his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" -- American political leaders rarely follow that advice.

SecDef Panetta

Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post has a good profile of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I agree that Panetta is different, and less impressive, than his predecessor, Bob Gates, who was probably the best -- most effective -- SecDef in history. But Panetta's shortcomings, according to the article, have been more errors of omission than commission: he hasn't done enough to change things.

Jaffe makes one particularly insightful point: "Panetta sometimes sounds more like a congressman representing the “Pentagon district” than the leader of the world’s largest military."  Every SecDef has to be an advocate for his institution with the rest of the government, and Panetta seems to do that well. But he also has to be part of the national security team, and the evidence is that he has done that well, too. So the bottom line has to be that Panetta so far is well above average for the job.