The Bully Pulpiteers

Contrary to what the most recent U.S. president named George told you, the oceans are “still there” and they still protect America. There is no evildoing navy or air force that can haul enough wild-eyed Islamofabulists here to conquer and occupy us. Another 9/11 will always be a slim possibility, no matter what we do, but fighting goofy wars overseas for gossamer reasons won’t prevent it. That 9/11 ever happened at all was proof positive of the institutional Onanism that infested the CIA and the FBI and the FAA and the NSA and JFCOM and rest of the alphabet soup that was supposed to keep it from happening.

June 30, the day all of our troops are supposed to be out of Iraq cities, is right around one of those corners Dick Cheney used to say we’d just turned. I can’t wait to hear the excuse the Obama administration springs on us about why we still have soldiers in places they swore they’d get them out of. We’re also about to shove another 21,000 G.I.s into Afghanistan, a maneuver that the Army appears to have been planning on since before the 2008 election, and there’s still danger that the American warmongery will elbow our president and legislature into displaying fool traits vis-à-vis Iran.

Philip Geraldi put up a stunning article at Antiwar.com on Tuesday about the decades of abject failure our clandestine operations have produced. “Covert action,” he adroitly notes, “rarely turns out to be positive in the long term because the covert action in itself inhibits healthy political tendencies in the targeted country.” Covert actions, he adds, “support elites and the military” and in result “they are essentially anti-democratic and regressive in nature.” He also aptly observes that no country we have our finger stuck in today is “more stable or better governed because of the American intervention in its affairs.”

One can reasonably argue—as Theodore Roosevelt did—that America has a responsibility to be the major player in world affairs. I have no argument with that argument, but I wholly disagree with the warmongery’s argument that staying engaged with the rest of the world means we have to keep blowing the bejesus out of it a scrap at a time. What makes us so happy about beating everyone else up these days? When I was a kid, everybody viewed bullies as overgrown jerks. We became a colossus with our 20^th century wars. I still assert that if we’d stayed out of the First World War, there might not have been a second one, or a cold one either. We can’t row upstream and relocate those boulders, but we can glance over our shoulders as we look upstream and think about what kind of world we want to be part of creating.

Russia and China won’t ever be military competitors, and we’ll never have another Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan to fight. Iran couldn’t bench press our jock strap. By some credible estimates, more than half of our Federal budget goes into funding defense related items, yet you seldom hear anybody with a mainstream pulpit blame the present state of our economy on our over-adventuresome military policies. You’ll hear instead about how the economy was going along swimmingly until all those blacks and Hispanics defaulted on $700 billion worth of mortgage loans the banks had to give them because of some law the liberals passed during the Carter years.

George Washington cautioned us to avoid entangling alliances. Dwight Eisenhower warned us to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” George W. Bush said, "I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best."

How is that we continue to heed the words of the third conservative in that lineup and ignore the first two?

As recently as May, the Obama administration was considering reaching out to coax “moderate” elements of the Taliban into laying down their arms. The Afghan government at the time was negotiating with the Taliban, whose initial demands included a total withdrawal of U.S. troops. In early June, Gen. Stanley McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee he wasn’t interested in talking to the Taliban. McChrystal’s new command is still on track to grow by 21,000 troops. Funny how that worked out, eh?

McChrystal now says he intends to shift the Afghanistan strategy away from remote regions of the country to concentrate on protecting population centers. Funny how we tried that before and it didn’t work out, so now we’re doing it again. UPI calls McChrystal “a Special Forces expert schooled in the counterinsurgency doctrines employed in Iraq.” That’s the kind of remark UPI probably derived from the press kit McChrystal’s public affairs people handed out.

The Pentagon has successfully pushed the media into parroting the “successful” Iraq strategy of Gen. David Petraeus line, which even Petraeus acolyte Tom Ricks admits “succeeded” because Petraeus gave everybody guns and bribed them not to shoot at anybody. Ricks also confesses that, “U.S. soldiers will probably be engaged in combat there [Iraq] until at least 2015.” Ricks says that conclusion reflects “The quiet consensus” of many soldiers who have served in Iraq. But it’s actually the “consensus” of Iraq commander Gen. Ray Odierno and the rest of the long war cabal, who have used Ricks and the rest of the media as a stenography pad to shill their agenda for eternal low level conflict.

And it appears that they now own the pulpit lock stock and bullhorn.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword and Antiwar.com. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The New Praetorians

“The Art of War for Dummies” discussed how poorly America’s uniformed and civilian leadership understand foreign policy and war’s place in it. “The New Praetorians” explores how we’re about to turn yet another corner on the road to Palookaville.

The MOOSEMUSS principles of war taught in our command and staff colleges might be adequate to steer us away from the misadventures we’ve fallen into lately if anyone could remember what MOOSEMUSS stands for.

One of the Os stands for objective, a principle that we have lost sight of. They say that in war, amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. But a true student of the art of war asks what a conflict is supposed to accomplish. I doubt if a single war wonk in our seat of power, in or out of uniform, ever gives serious consideration to objectives, unless it’s to make up stupid ones to stuff into a shuck and jive strategy document like the one on Afghanistan that James Jones and his National Security Council characters put out a few months ago.

The other O stands for offensive. We need to white that one out and pencil in initiative. The notion that it's always better to be on the attack is a preemptive delusion. What we really want to do is shape the battle to our advantage regardless of whether we're in an offensive or defensive posture. It's better to be the guy behind the machine gun than the guy charging across the open field in front of it, just as an effective Homeland Security is a surer way of protecting America from terrorists than blowing half of Asia to smithereens.

We won’t analyze the entire MOOSEMUSS litany here. Mass, offensive, objective, security, economy of force, unity of command, surprise and simplicity will wait for another discussion. Suffice it to say that the language we use to describe our wars now is so convoluted that no sane person can comprehend it. At his confirmation hearings, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new Bananastan honcho, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his measure of effectiveness would not be the number of bad guys killed, but “It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” This is the guy we’ve given “carte blanche” to do whatever he wants to do over there. If he really wants to shield Afghans from violence, he should march all of his troops into a big old jet airliner and fly them home. As the former head of the hushy Joint Special Operations Command, he was directly responsible for the collateral damage deaths of innumerable innocents. With shields like him, who needs enemies?

It is not possible to deny modern terrorists “sanctuary.” Given the state of our information technology, evildoers can run their operations from any square inch on the planet, and we simply can’t occupy that much territory. The best analysis we have—and it’s from the folks at the Rand Corporation, who are among the world’s most respected security analysts—tells us that the best way to counter terrorism is with “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.” The Rand study of terror groups that operated between 1968 and 2006 reveals than over 80 percent of them were vanquished through political and policing solutions. Military force accounted for a miserable seven percent of the victories over terrorists throughout that 38-year period.

So what in the wide world of sports, arts and sciences are we doing sending McChrystal and another 21,000 troops to Afghanistan? Who is he going to protect Afghans from, the Taliban? Why not have him invade Mexico to protect Mexicans from Latinos. McChrystal told the Senate committee he doesn’t think the Taliban can be persuaded to sever their ties with al Qaeda because there has been so much intermarriage between the two groups. Can he really believe that this intermarriage business is limited to the Taliban and al Qaeda? We can’t know how many Talibannisters and al Qaedians there are, but McChrystal can probably count the number of Bananastanis who aren’t related to somebody in one of those two outfits on the calculating equipment he keeps in his jump boots.

Renaissance era political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that Rome’s downfall came about from the rise of the Praetorian Guard, the elite military corps that accumulated so much power it controlled both the Emperor and the Senate. It appears that our elite commando forces have become the new Praetorians, and like their predecessors, they’ve managed to bully the executive and legislative branches of their government into foreign policies that ensure them permanent employment.

We’ve been down this avenue so many times. Firearms revolutionized warfare, then rifled artillery re-revolutionized it, then armor made horse cavalry obsolete, then airpower made everything else old helmet, then nuclear weapons came along. Now, we have David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal, special warriors whose powers and abilities allow them to do the dirty work we normal men aren’t capable of. King David can do more one-armed pushups than teenaged privates. Stan the Man sleeps just a few hours a night and only eats one meal a day. He must not have to go to the bathroom very much, and what he deposits there most likely doesn’t offend the nose.

McChrystal also listens to audio books on an iPod as he runs to and from work. He needs to plug into some Clausewitz and Sun Tzu; from the sound of his talk, his worldview comes straight from Steven King and Tom Clancy.

It’s tough to come to terms with the notion that history’s mightiest nation got its foreign policy from two of history’s cheesiest fiction writers.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword and Antiwar.com. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Sergeant Fury Goes Bananastan

Tom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times tell us that General Stan McChrystal has been given “carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks.”

The “ambitious new strategy” they’re referring to is the one that National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks trotted out in March. It’s a compost heap of aphoristic piffle about how we’re going to disrupt terror networks, and establish stable democratic governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how we’ll get people all over the world to join hands on a love train “to actively assist in addressing these objectives.”

The strategy discusses “breaking the link between narcotics and the insurgency,” and proposes “crop substitution and alternative livelihood programs,” and focusing on “high level drug lords,” measures that have worked so well in South and Central America that illegal drug trafficking in the U.S. has all but disappeared. If we were serious about rubbing out the narcotics industry in the Bananastans we’d firebomb all the poppy fields, but we won’t do that. It might work, and then how would Stan the Man explain that after going through all the trouble of eliminating narcotics in the Bananastans we still have an insurgency there.

The new strategy—the one that Shanker and Schmitt label “President Obama’s new strategy”—talks about the Taliban, but it doesn’t discuss visions of “stepped-up attacks” on them. In fact, from the sound of his testimony to Congress, McChrystal plans to take the opposite approach. “The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” McChrystal also told the SASC that the Bananastan war is “winnable,” but he failed to mention how many shielded Afghans would constitute “winning.”

According to Shanker and Schmitt, the SASC’s approval of McChrystal’s appointment only came after Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, went to the floor to make an “impassioned plea” for “Republicans to allow the action to proceed.” “Republicans,” in this case, consisted of John McCain, who Pat Tillman’s mother accused of “playing dumb” about the cover up surrounding the circumstances her son’s death. But according to J. Taylor Rushing of The Hill, McCain supported McChrystal’s appointment. So what gives?

According to the Times story, Reid got a phone call from Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, who told Reid “that there was a sense of urgency that General McChrystal be able to go to Afghanistan that very night.” Mullen reportedly told Reid that “McChrystal is literally waiting by an airplane” to fly to Afghanistan. The source of this information, as you might have guessed, was Harry Reid. Shanker and Schmitt put the waiting-by-an-airplane remark in quotations. That’s the first time I’ve noticed the New York Times make a direct quote from hearsay. I’m sure they’ve done it before.

The story contains another dicey Mullen quote: “Admiral Mullen said that he personally told General McChrystal that ‘he could have his pick from the Joint Staff. His job, the mission he’s going to command, is that important. Afghanistan is the main effort right now.’” I can’t tell for the life of me if Mullen actually said that to one of the Times reporters or if they got it from “Almost a dozen senior military officers” who “provided details about General McChrystal’s plans in interviews after his nomination.”

According to Shanker and Schmitt, these almost dozen officers “insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the effort, and insisted that their comments not be used until the Senate vote, so as not to preempt lawmakers.” I’m still trying to figure out why, if their comments couldn’t be revealed until after the Senate vote, their names couldn’t be revealed either. I’m also wondering how many senior military officers “almost a dozen” comprise. Three? One?

However many or few senior military officers it took to plant this story in the New York Times, the message got through. McChrystal “has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates” including many anonymous “Special Operations veterans.” It will take a metric ton of research to discover when “Special Operations” became a proper noun. Maybe it happened in early 2007 when Tom Ricks gushed suds over how many one-armed pushups General David Petraeus could do.

Whatever the case, special operations has become to the new American century of war what airpower was to the old American century of war: a panacea that promises to reduce the horror of armed conflict to a tightly focused contest played out by living, breathing comic book characters against minions of evil, a struggle that the rest of us can more or less forget about because superheroes are taking care of it for us. Barack Obama named McChrystal to take over the Bananastan debacle, the Times collapsed on itself to make the general look like a two-eyed version of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield. An “ascetic,” they called him, “who is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep,” and who “usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness.” That story came from Elizabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazetti. Liz and Mark didn’t mention how many dozens of senior military officers told them that, nor did they postulate on how seldom McChrystal goes to the bathroom. How many dozens of permanent latrine orderlies would have to spill the beans on that score before the Times would publish such a figure?

As best I can discern, zero senior latrine orderlies told Shanker and Schmitt about the “corps of 400 officers” who will ably assist McChrystal in doing that voodoo that he apparently does do so well when he finally gets on that airplane he’s been standing next to for what, days by now, and soars off to his next tour of duty to unleash that “ambitious new strategy.”

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The Art of War for Dummies (Revisited)

Yet another take on the start of the Art of War series.

Military precision is to precision what Kenny G is to jazz. So it is that the art of war—known in our command and staff colleges as operational art—has a language so vague that it’s useless.

Take the term center of gravity. Everyone concurs that it is a vital concept, but nobody agrees on what it means. A Marine will tell you there can only be one center of gravity, but that's because Marines can only think about one thing at a time. An Air Force pilot will tell you a center of gravity is anything he can bomb, so you need to buy him a lot of expensive bombers so he can bomb everything. A naval aviator will tell you the center of gravity is always an aircraft carrier, even in land warfare. If you ask an intelligence officer what a center of gravity is he'll tell you it's classified so don’t quote him by name, and if you ask an Army general he'll start breathing through his mouth.

No wonder the dummies running our woebegone wars can’t find their way out of Iraq or the Bananastans with a map and a flashlight.

Many rear echelon desk commandos in the Pentagon think the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen says "the real centers of gravity” are the Afghan people. Senator John Kerry says the strategic center of gravity in Afghanistan is Pakistan, an observation that reflects his track record at crafting winning strategies.

The 19^th century Prussian general and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz defined center of gravity (Schwerpunkt) as "the point against which all our energies should be directed.” Clausewitz also established as writ that “the political object” must determine both “the military objective to be reached.” It doesn’t take a masters degree in war to conclude that an enemy’s centers of gravity is the main obstacle between our objective and us, and that our center of gravity is the asset that will achieve our objective.

Clausewitz tells us that "Strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war,” So maybe it’s understandable that our leaders are so confused about the center of gravity in the Bananastans. National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war party unveiled our new Bananastan strategy in March, and its “realistic and achievable objectives” are unadulterated delirium.

We can’t create “an effective government in Afghanistan” or a “stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” “Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan” won’t “degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.” The only thing today’s terrorists need to plan and launch international attacks is an iPhone; they don’t need to hunker down in a mountain top cave on the far side of the Khyber Pass to use one of those things. They have freedom of action to run their operation from front row center at the Cannes Film Festival if they choose to. “Involving the international community to actively assist in addressing these objectives” won’t be of any help. The Bananastan strategy objectives are so fantastic that the intergalactic community from the Star Trek universe couldn’t help us achieve them.

Not even the Vulcans could deduce logical centers of gravity from the war aims the Jones gang has dreamt up. Spock himself would blanch at the thought of crafting measures of effectiveness to measure whether or not we’re making progress toward achieving such cockamamie goals; but Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new top Bananastan general, has taken a shot at it. “The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his June 2 confirmation hearing. “It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.”

Not a single member of that committee had sufficient intellect or spine to ask McChrystal how many shielded Afghans, in his opinion, might constitute victory. Attempts to calculate how any number of shielded Afghans might lead to achieving objective suggested by our military and civilian war wonks evoke an image resembling Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.

Centers of gravity can change over time, space and levels of war. That sounds more convoluted than a double-decker 3-D chess tournament at first, but it’s reasonably simple. Folks who can spell their names correctly will catch on to the time and space aspects quickly enough: Next week’s umptieth reoccupation of al Kaboom will have different centers of gravity than today’s air raid on the terrorist camp that’s camouflaged as a Muslim wedding chapel. The basic levels of war are the tactical, operational and strategic. The tactical level is where combat takes place and the strategic level is where military actions achieve (or fail to achieve) a war’s political aims. Tactical actions are planned and coordinated to achieve strategic goals at the operational level.

Tactical and operational centers of gravity consist of some type of armed force. To the U-Boat skipper task is to sink a supply convoy, the enemy center of gravity is the convoy’s destroyer escort. An operational center of gravity may be the armored division that blocks us from capturing a major oil field or an air defense system that thwarts our efforts to bomb key enemy infrastructure.

Strategic centers of gravity are always political leadership. Common military wisdom deems that popular support or national resources or the media can be strategic centers of gravity, but common military wisdom is all too common and none too wise. Population, resources and so on may be critical factors—strengths, weaknesses or critical vulnerabilities—but they are only important as they affect political leadership. The obsession Mullen and McChrystal have with the Afghan populace is cause for grave concern. A population may influence leadership with its vote or by storming the palace, but it is your enemy’s leadership, not its angry mob, that can produce the political behavior you want. The effect of popular opinion is minimal in oppressive nations, but the people’s influence is often overrated even in so-called liberal democracies. In the last two federal elections, Americans overwhelmingly voted for the anti-war agenda. For all the good it did us, we all might as well have cast our ballots in Florida.

The overarching importance of political leadership in war makes you want to think very, very hard before you charge off with a goal of regime change, as our Mesopotamia mistake so vividly and tragically illustrates.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Our McMan in Bananastan

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new Bananastan war chief, may be more dangerous and even crazier than his boss, Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command. McChrystal reportedly eats one meal a day and sleeps three hours a night. We can’t know for sure if that’s true, but we can assume McChrystal wants us to think it is because it comes from the New York Times, who almost certainly got it from the press kit McChrystal’s public affairs colonel gave them.

Unconfirmed rumor also has it that McChrystal only drinks rain water to avoid the effects of fluoridation on his precious bodily fluids, and that he takes acai berry purgatives to maintain his purity of essence. However much of this is true or merely legend crafting, it’s all loony enough to make Petraeus’s one-arm push up contests with teenage privates look dignified in comparison.

From the sound of McChrystal’s recent confirmation hearing testimony, the insanity is just leaving the station. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee “I believe [the Afghanistan conflict] is winnable, but I don't think it will be easily winnable." It won’t be easy to win because it will be impossible to tell when we’ve won. "The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed,” McChrystal told the SASC, “It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” How many shielded Afghans will equate to victory? More importantly, who is going to shield them? Certainly not McChrystal.

As commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), McChrystal was directly responsible for assassination strikes that have killed so many innocents in the Bananastans. Paradoxically, those strikes were the reason McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. Mark McKiernan, got the axe. Compounding the irony is the way McKiernan came to be cast as the fall stooge.

Throughout our post-9/11 missteps, the JSOC has largely operated outside the established chain of command; the only authority it appeared to answer to was Dick Cheney. When the Dark Lord left office in January 2009, the JSOC became a free agent. By mid-February the mounting outrage over the collateral deaths from JSOC strikes forced Vice Adm. William McRaven, who had succeeded McChrystal as head of the JSOC in the summer of 2008, to put a temporary halt to them. McKiernan’s spokes-colonel Gregory Julian confessed that his boss had not ordered the stand down, and a “senior military official” said Petraeus allowed as how throttling back on the baby killing for a couple of weeks was maybe a good idea. Those statements from the four-stars made it clear that the three-star McRaven was running his own program.

When the stand down story hit the press in March, Petraeus likely determined someone would have to ride the rap for the collateral deaths the JSOC had caused, and he didn’t want it to be McRaven or McChrystal, who he still had use for. So Petraeus quietly issued an order that put the JSOC under tactical control of McKiernan, which made McKiernan responsible for the McCluster bombs McRaven and McChrystal and their howling commandos had created. McKiernan’s transfer to Fort Palooka came through in short order and McChrystal became the new McMan in Bananastan. The McHinations didn’t stop there.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he nominated McChrystal because he wanted “new military leadership” to go along with the “new strategy.” The new strategy is the one National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks wretched together. It is a compendium of platitudes, aphorisms and nonsequiturs; a fusty heap of “realistic and achievable objectives” that are delusional and doomed to failure. We will never establish a “stable constitutional government in Pakistan” or a “capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan.” If by some miracle we manage to create “self-reliant Afghan security forces” all we’ll have done is organize another armed mob that doesn’t like us. We’re already “involving the international community” for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Gates has forged a hobby career out of alternately begging NATO for more help in Afghanistan and blaming NATO for everything that goes wrong there.

The strategy’s stated aim to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan” is as hallucinatory as it is poorly written. You can’t “defeat” a safe haven any more than you can climb a tennis ball; but even if you could, there would be no point in doing it. Modern evildoers can run their operations from the sanctuary of the pockets that hold their Blackberries. Averting “the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile material” is a snipe hunt. Evildoers are about as likely to convert Pakistani nukes into suitcase bombs as they are to find a cure for herpes.

Yet Stanley McChrystal has sworn to Congress that he can accomplish all these things and more if only he can shield enough Afghans from violence. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees had a golden opportunity to decapitate McChrystal and the Pentagon over their Bananastan plan and torture of detainees and the Pat Tillman cover-up and a host of other mortal sins, but they vaginalized it. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) made a show of growling at McChrystal for a few minutes before he rolled over and begged for a tummy scratch.

Nobody in the legislature had the baby makers to oppose McChrystal’s nomination because he enjoys the aegis of the most powerful man on earth. As military analyst Andrew Bacevich puts it, "McKiernan's removal confirms that it's now Petraeus's army,” and King David’s hand-picked “unconventional warriors” like McChrystal and McRaven are “in the saddle.” In 2007, Petraeus purposely misled Congress into believing he was seeking a way to bring troops home from Iraq while he was actually using the surge as a stratagem to buy time to sell the “long war” to the public, and he got away with it. Now he and his protégés McChrystal and McRaven are poised to get away with the same shenanigans in the Bananastans.

And where does our commander in chief Barack Obama stand on all of this? He’s the one blessed the resumption of the errant air strikes and who nominated McChrystal to take over in the Bananastans. Our self-anointed “agent of change” has changed into what his predecessor was: a fawning servant of America’s warlords.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Spring Break

I'm taking a late spring break to entertain guests and play with dogs. Here's part one of a work in progress I'm calling "The Art of War for Dummies." All comments are welcome and appreciated.

The Art of War for Dummies

by Jeff Huber

Military precision is to precision what Kenny G is to jazz. So it is that the art of war—known as operational art in our war colleges—has a language so vague that it’s useless.

Take the term center of gravity. Everyone concurs that it is a vital concept, but nobody agrees on what it means. A Marine will tell you there can only be one center of gravity, but that's because Marines can only think about one thing at a time. An Air Force pilot will tell you a center of gravity is anything he can bomb, so you need to buy him a lot of expensive bombers so he can bomb everything. A naval aviator will tell you the center of gravity is always an aircraft carrier, even in land warfare. If you ask an intelligence officer what a center of gravity is he'll tell you it's classified, and if you ask an Army general he'll start breathing through his mouth.

No wonder we can’t find our way out of Iraq or the Bananastans with a map and a flashlight. Our operational art vocabulary reached its culminating point a long time ago. We need a new dictionary of war.

Stay Centered

Military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz described the center of gravity (Schwerpunkt) as "the point against which all our energies should be directed.” Successful undertakings in any field of endeavor focus on an objective. War, the gravest of human undertakings, can be no exception. It's not by accident that our present wars stumble from sand trap to precipice to strategic abyss. The objectives our military and civilian leaders give us are jingoisms designed to prod our irrational fears (if we leave, they will follow us here on their flying carpets) or to arouse our juvenile sense of national virility (If we leave, they will call us girly men).

The asset that can achieve our objective is our center of gravity; the enemy asset that can thwart our aim is his. The more specifically we can define objectives, the more accurately we can identify centers of gravity and focus our efforts. The more vague or imprudent our objective becomes, the more counterproductive our efforts will be. "To establish a stable democracy," for example, doesn't easily translate into military action.

Stay Calm

Centers of gravity can change over time, space and levels of war. Folks who can spell their names will catch on to the concept of time and space movement easily enough. Next week’s siege of al Kaboom will have different centers of gravity than today’s air raid on the terrorist camp that’s camouflaged as a wedding chapel.

Coming to grips with levels of war isn’t the Vulcan chess tournament seems at first: the basic levels of war are the tactical, the operational, and the strategic. The tactical level is where force on force combat occurs. The strategic level is where armed force achieves a war's political aims, and the operational level coordinates the tactical and strategic levels.

Strategic centers of gravity are always political leadership. Common military wisdom deems that popular support or national resources or the media can be strategic centers of gravity, but common military wisdom is all too common and none too wise. Population, resources and so on may be critical factors—strengths, weaknesses or critical vulnerabilities—but they are only important as they affect political leadership. The population may influence leadership with its vote or by storming the palace, but it is your enemy’s leadership, not its angry mob, that can produce the political behavior you want. The overarching strategic importance of political leadership makes you want to think very, very hard before you charge off with a goal of regime change, as our Mesopotamia mistake so vividly illustrates.

Tactical and operational centers of gravity are always some aspect of armed force, the thing that can physically accomplish the military objective. For the U-boat skipper whose mission is to sink an Allied supply convoy, the enemy tactical center of gravity is the convoy's destroyer escort. Operational centers of gravity will normally be large units or a collection of forces, like a mechanized division or an air defense system. Things like training, morale, material readiness, command and control and so on may be critical factors, but only as they directly contribute to the effectiveness of the center of gravity, and they are almost never the center of gravity themselves.

Stay Collected

Centers of gravity may be massed or dispersed. An armored division makes for a relatively dense center of gravity while guerilla forces are usually so dispersed that they do not present an operational center of gravity at all. That’s why conventional forces can often be defeated swiftly and decisively, while there’s really no such thing as defeating an insurgency.

Massed centers of gravity tend to accumulate critical factors—most notably critical vulnerabilities—that can be exploited through maneuver warfare methods that produce results exponentially greater than the effort expended. An armored division’s reliance on fuel and passable terrain can constitute a critical vulnerability. Air interdiction can sever these essentials from the division, perhaps defeating it even before our ground forces make direct contact.

Those pesky insurgents are a different matter. The only real winners of guerilla wars are the players with a home field advantage. The closest an away team can come to not losing is to stick around long enough to join the local gene pool, and as Sun Tzu warned, "No nation ever benefitted from a prolonged war." It's little wonder that security analysts at the globally respected Rand Corporation recommend we conduct our counter-terror strategies with "a light U.S. military footprint or none at all."

Not only have the asymmetric wars we're fighting reduced us to linear attrition warfare methods (keeping score by body count), we've actually reverse-maneuvered ourselves: escalating our efforts makes things exponentially worse when we create multiple new evildoers for every one we attrite.

Part II will describe how our Iraq and Bananastan fiascos violate the principles of warfare and what awaits us on the far side of the Khyber Pass.

One Ricks Makes a Wrong

Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.

Ricks’s most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a Firedoglake book forum. In reply to a commenter who asked if “more deaths in Iraq are worth it,” Ricks said, “I think staying in Iraq is immoral. But I think that leaving Iraq is even more immoral.” In a nutshell, Ricks framed the core fallacy in the long war philosophy: that two wrongs can make a right. This theme dominates Rick’s work these days. The Gamble and the media blitz that accompanied its debut were dazzling examples of what Voltaire was talking about when he said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Ricks continues to exalt General David Petraeus, who he has known since Petraeus was a colonel or a light colonel (Ricks says he can’t remember which). Ricks became King David’s chief legend maker when the Iraq surge began in January 2007. In a radio interview that month on WNYC in New York, Ricks described Petraeus as a “fascinating character” and “just about the best general in the Army.” He specifically cited Petraeus’s “very successful first tour” as commander in Mosul after the fall of Baghdad, but made little mention that the general tamed the city by handing out guns and bribes, and that months after Petraeus left Mosul the chief of police defected and the place went up for grabs again. (Mosul remains a major trouble spot to this day, and Petraeus is still arming and bribing militants.)

By August 2007 Ricks was waxing giddy over Petraeus’s persona. On NPR he called the general “a force of nature,” and gushed as he described the sight of Petraeus engaging in pushup contests with privates less than half his age. A veteran Pentagon reporter like Ricks should have seen the pushup prank for the used chicken feed it was, but by then Ricks was already sleeping in the general’s field cot.

Freud would have a field day with some of Ricks’s latest disclosures. In The Gamble, Ricks flat out admits that Petraeus deceived Congress (and betrayed the country) by telling the House Foreign Affairs committee he aimed to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." Petraeus’s plan all along, Ricks confesses, was “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” How does Ricks view this Promethean abuse of power and trust? “"The surge was the right step to take,” He says. It was “the least wrong move in a misconceived war.”

The “least wrong move” mantra might carry Petraeus’s water if Ricks backed it up with a sound argument, but his justifications are a logic lizard that consumes itself from the tail forward. Ricks warns that if we leave Iraq, things will almost certainly go back to the way they were under Saddam Hussein. But he also asserts that things are worse in Iraq then than they were before we invaded because “Saddam was kind of an aging, toothless tiger” and “wasn‘t a threat to anybody.” So we have to stay to keep things from getting better.

Ricks also echoes the ghost story that if we leave Iraq, a regional war is a “live possibility.” None of the countries in that region are capable of projecting conventional force much beyond their own borders, and the only nation in that part of the world capable of nuking anyone else is Israel. Terrorists organizations are already in place and we’ve seen what they can do, which is nothing compared to the havoc we have wrought with our preemptive delusions.

Ricks judges that it was “quite noble” of surge proponents like Ambassador Ray Crocker who “allegedly opposed the initial invasion of Iraq” to “step into something they thought was a mistake.” As if deliberately perpetuating a mistake could ever be a noble thing.

Ricks has evolved into such an incorrigible bull feather merchant he’s taken to lashing out at anyone who presents a viewpoint different from the one he and his masters are shilling. He decries refutations of his rhetoric as “personal” attacks, and harangues his critics with angry emails. At the Firedoglake forum, a guest asked Ricks to comment about criticisms of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new commander in the Bananastans, made recently by my colleague Gareth Porter. Ricks replied, “If Gareth Porter is reporting it, then it’s probably wrong. ‘Nuff said?” (“’Nuff said” is one of those macho expressions guys like Ricks use when they want to sound like Ralph Peters.)

I am familiar enough with Porter’s methods to know he practices sound journalism. Ricks, on the other hand, has succumbed to the access poisoning that has plagues most of the mainstream Washington media. He spent decades courting inside sources. They have now become the movers and shakers of the American hegemony, and he is their court stenographer. The most blatant example of this was his “transformation” of General Ray Odierno from the raging ox whose incompetence was the main cause of the insurgency to the genius who “conceived and executed” the surge strategy “by himself in Baghdad.” The sources of this revelation were Odierno’s subordinates and mentors and Odierno himself.

In response to an Antiwar.com piece criticizing Ricks and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security, Ricks growled: “This is what happens when someone writes about an area about which they know absolutely freaking nothing.” What Thomas E. Ricks knows about national defense he learned from a flock of and tank thinkers and Pentagon desk rangers who don’t know their centers of gravity from their elbows. If Ricks limits himself to writing what he knows about, we’ll never hear from him again.

Let’s hope that happens real soon.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Fort Palooka

The recent announcement of General David McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war mongrels on the rabid right can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.

Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for. On top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that McKiernan requested for no apparent reason. (When Obama asked him how he’d use the extra troops, McKiernan made the sound of sandbags forming a levee.)

So we’re on track to escalate a war for which the administration admits there is no military solution and continuing to employ attrition tactics that make more new bad guys than they attrite. It's enough to make Clausewitz claw at his coffin lid.

Here’s how you’re supposed to plan and execute a military strategy. You look at a situation and you decide what kind of political end state you want to achieve. Then you decide if you can formulate a feasible military objective that can accomplish the policy aim. Next you determine the adversary’s center of gravity, which is the thing (or collection of things) he can use to thwart your military plan, and the thing you have to defeat. Only when you’ve done those things do you begin to calculate how many troops you need to accomplish the mission, and after that you start working details like logistics.

But with our Bananastan strategy, we started with logistics and worked our way backwards. In January 2009, the Washington Post reported that the Army was already building $1.1 billion worth of Fort Palookas in Afghanistan to accommodate additional troops, and planned to begin spending an additional $1.3 billion on construction in 2010. That money started queuing up at the hopper well before McKiernan’s request for 30,000 additional troops became public. It’s a cherished military stratagem: throw bad seed money at whatever hooliganism you want; then Congress has to throw good money after it or be labeled as “weak on national security.”

Gates’s bull feather merchants had been making a show of working on a Bananastan strategy when they decided to let the stink roll uphill for a change. As the Post reported, they began “looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates.” That’s a traditional military leadership technique known in the trenches as “the buck stops there.”

The White House national security team—laughably described by Robert Dreyfus in a recent Rolling Stone article as “Obama’s chess masters”—unveiled a white paper describing its new Bananastan strategy in late March. National Security Adviser James Jones and the rest of the chess club based their plan on “realistic and achievable” objectives that are fantastic and unattainable. We cannot, as they suggest, make stable governments in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “Increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” is a pipe dream that, even if it comes true, would simply give us one more armed outfit in the region that we can’t control. Their initiative for “involving the international community” makes one wonder if they’ve been paying attention at all. To hear Gates tell it, everything that’s gone wrong in the Bananastans is NATO’s fault, so why would we want more international involvement?

The most delusional aspect of the new strategy is its “core goal,” which is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens.” Modern terrorists need safe havens like dolphins need power tools. The only sanctuary they need to plan and coordinate their operations is a pocket large enough to conceal an iPhone.

The white paper makes no mention of centers of gravity, critical strengths and vulnerabilities, measures of effectiveness, decisive points, courses of action, lines of operations, or any other term that belongs in a proper strategy involving military action. It contains a host of trendy platitudes about a “new way of thinking” and “building a clear consensus.” The paper even has talk of bringing non-military forms of power to bear, as if that’s something new. Information, diplomacy and economy were key elements of warfare long before Thucydides and Sun Tsu wrote on the subject around 400 BCE. And make no mistake; when a foreign policy action involves shooting people and blowing things up, it’s not “economic assistance” or “education and training.” It’s “war.”

When a strategy’s aphorisms morph into non-sequiturs, you know none of the think tankers involved with the project was doing any thinking, new or otherwise. “A strategic communications program must be created, made more effective, and resourced,” the chess set tells us in its white paper. I wonder which they’ll do first: create the program or make it more effective.

I’ve said before that in order to put an end to the American security state, Obama needs to order every military officer from the full bird level up to retire. It is now clear that he also needs to purge the defense apparatus of its thundering flock of foreign policy wonks. It may be that the generals and tank thinkers driving our ship of state will drop dead from brain hemorrhage before they make America the latest superpower to embalm itself in Afghanistan, but don't count on it.

I doubt if Obama will do what needs to be done. Look on the bright side, though. Athens produced most of the art and philosophy that defined western civilization only after it lost its wars with Persia and Sparta, so maybe America can still become Ronald Reagan's "shining city upon a hill.”

If we do, we’ll need a new generation of strategists who know that it’s better to charge down a hill than up one.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Anchors A-waste

The U.S. Navy is fumbling a blue and golden opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of its maritime global reach capability (and justify its phony baloney budget) in the age of fourth generation warfare. Admiral Gary Roughead, who as Chief of Naval Operations is the service’s senior officer, says sea power is not sufficient to combat the Somali pirate threat. "Pirates don't live at sea,” he recently told reporters at a Navy League conference. “They live ashore. They move their money ashore. You can't have a discussion about eradicating piracy without having a discussion about the shore dimension."

A mind that astute could only have been shaped at the United States Naval Academy. Yeah, Gary: all of Yamamoto’s people lived ashore too, but you didn’t get to bomb their homeland until you sank their fleet.

In an April 18 NPR interview, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the pirate problem “It’s not just a military solution here.” As you’d probably guess, Mullen is also a USNA grad. It’s never just a military solution, Mike. Even World War II involved economy, diplomacy, information and other forms of soft power.

The Navy will never again have a peer competitor like the Imperial Japanese Fleet to contend with for control of the great oceans, and it has been so desperate to play a role in the war on ism that it plucked career aviators out of shore duty assignments to deploy to Iraq as part of Army counter-explosive teams. Yet, incredibly, when faced with the prospect of having to counter the only maritime threat in existence—teenage pirates—the top naval officers in our land flip their palms skyward and whine, “It’s not our job.”

It’s time to start asking why we have a navy.

Only once in a month of blue moons do I rest an argument on my expertise and authority. But as I’ve said before, two carrier strike groups—with their self-contained airborne early warning, fixed wing surface search, rotary wing lift, special forces, surface combatant and command and control capabilities—could, properly employed, shut down the pirate pranks faster than you can say Arr, Jim Boy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is wrong.

Using carrier strike groups to battle teenage pirates sounds like overkill, but what better things have the carriers got to do? Blow the smithereens out of Afghan civilians? Do manly air-to-air combat with Taliban MiGs? Oh, that’s right…the Taliban doesn’t have any MiGs. It doesn’t have an air force at all, or a navy, for that matter. It can barely be said to have an army, even though it’s doing a pretty good job of mopping up in Pakistan.

The argument that carriers are too expensive to use against teenage pirates is specious. We always have at least two carrier groups deployed, peacetime or wartime. They’ll cost just as much chasing pirates as they do drilling holes in the sea and sky.

Emblematic of our national security state is that even though aircraft carriers presently contribute goose eggs to our national security, Congress has approved the purchase of a new class of aircraft carrier that will cost twice as much to make as the old class. The Navy justifies the additional up front cost with the promise of future savings in operating and maintenance costs. When the future arrives, of course, the savings will have will have vanished like the apple pies on Aunt Polly’s windowsill. To make things even more preposterous, the new class of carriers will be named after Gerald R. Ford. What, they had to settle for Ford because Mad magazine wouldn’t give up the copyright to Alfred E. Neuman? I suppose if they ever get their cockamamie flying submarine off the drawing board they’ll name it after Joe Lieberman.

Events at sea are only relevant as they affect events on land; but Broadhead, Mullen and those who think like them are asserting that we need to send force ashore to affect events at sea. An April 13 Bloomberg story reported that the U.S. military was considering “attacks on Somali pirates’ land bases.” Neocon tank thinker James Carafano says, “There really isn’t a silver-bullet solution other than going into Somalia and rooting out the bases.”

The problem with all this talk of rooting out pirate bases with silver bullets is that modern pirates need “bases” like modern terrorists need “sanctuary.” Today’s evildoers, fanatic or piratical, can plan, direct and finance their operations from an iPhone. Good luck rooting out all those things with preemptive deterrence.

Exploiting an opportunity to resolve a national security issue at sea avoids a host of difficulties associated with use of force in a sovereign nation. Navies have an inherent right to occupy international waters, whereas armies have to jump through a jungle of legal and moral hoops to pitch tents in somebody else’s campground. Invading another nation requires a declaration (or capitulation) some sort from Congress and it’s a good idea to get a mandate from the U.N. too. Laws are already in place for combating piracy.

You don’t need to get the New York Times to print a phony baloney reason why it’s important to fight pirates. It doesn’t matter if pirates were or weren’t involved in 9/11 or what they are or aren’t up to with their nuclear program. You can whack them just because they’re pirates committing piracy. There’s a very low risk of collateral damage from a Navy sniper shooting a handful of pirates in a dingy. Compare that to the risks involved when you carpet bomb a Somali village on the chance that the head assistant evil one you’re targeting showed up for the wedding like your bad intelligence said he was going to.

Of course, the top brass may not consider teenage pirates much of a threat to national security after all. Mullen says it’s up to merchants to pay for their own protection, but they don’t want to do that "because it costs them too much money." If they don’t want to hire Blackwater to guard their ships, let ‘em go fish, eh Mikey?

That makes a certain amount of sense except that Mullen also says “it's about what the international community is going to do with respect to Somalia. So Mullen wants to have a sort of Global War on Piracy (GWOP), I guess. Funny how we go it alone when we want to but it takes a global village when we don’t.

And if Mullen doesn’t give a sailor’s first night in port whether we deal with the teenage pirate threat or not, how come he told the pod people who host ABC’s Good Morning America that the military has initiated a review to look "broadly and widely and deeply" at the pirate problem. "We've actually been focused on this issue for some period of time and set up a task force out in that part of the world last fall," he told the pod people. "We've had a focus on it,” he said. The pod people nodded. “There are many, many people working on it right now,” he said. The pod people smiled.

I wonder if Mullen’s nose popped out of joint when Smart Power poster girl Hillary Clinton announced that she too had been broadly and widely and deeply looking at this issue for some period of time, and that many, many people in her State Department were also working on it. Between DoD and DoS, it sounds like many, many, people indeed are focusing on a solution to what Hillary, old salt that she is, calls the “scourge of piracy.”

A committee that size is guaranteed to come up with a counter-piracy strategy that looks like something along the lines of a seagoing giraffe.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Dumb Like a Maliki?

Remember when we all thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Malachi was just another Ahmed Pyle fresh off the bus from Palookadad? Now look at him: he’s a Machiavelli-class political operative, the head of a propped up state who just told his masters to drive it up their exit ramps by demanding that they honor the Status of Forces Agreement whether they like it or not.

Keep in mind, though, that in 1980 Saddam Hussein sentenced Maliki to death. Now Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death and executed, and Maliki has his job. How about them apples? Maliki is so powerful today, in fact, that he may be the only political figure who can help Barack Obama—the head of state of the most powerful nation in history—out of the crack he’s wiggled himself into.

The warmongery that controls the Pentagon and Congress never did take any of that Iraq withdrawal timeline jive seriously. Defense secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser James Jones, “King David” Petraeus and Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno are all on record as having said withdrawal timelines are a bad idea. Odierno has, through Petraeus publicist Tom Ricks, broadly expressed his desire to see 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015, Status of Forces Agreement and Obama campaign promises be damned. Early in April, Odierno put out the word that he might ignore the June 30 deadline for U.S. troops to leave Iraqi cities, and it looked like another domino was about to drop in the Pentagon’s “hell no, we won’t go” strategy. Then Maliki said “not so fast,” and told Babe Odierno to have his troops out of Mosul and the rest of the cities by the end of June and that they couldn’t go back without a hall pass.

Two aspects of this event should shock every American. First is that Odierno, who is four levels down in the chain of command (under Obama, Gates and Petraeus) announced he might unilaterally abrogate an occupation arrangement agreed to at a level higher than his. Second, and perhaps more alarming, is that the only guy who threw the bull plop flag about it was the prime minister of the occupied country. Nobody in the White House or Congress did anything but put palm prints on the seats of their pants. The military’s take over of America is now so complete that the Buck Turgidsons and Jack D. Rippers can do whatever they want and the rest of the body politic demurs as if it’s the Pentagon’s Constitutional right to dictate policy to the executive and the legislature.

There’s one political journalist, though, who’s willing to pretend the Obama administration hasn’t been rolled flat by the military industrial cash caisson. With his article in the May 14 edition of Rolling Stone, Robert Dreyfus has become for Team Obama what Tom Ricks is for Team Petraeus and what Joseph Goebbels was for you-know-who. “Obama’s Chess Masters” is as a stunning a piece of White House propaganda as anything Dick Cheney’s minions ever filtered through the New York Times. “The president has assembled a trusted circle of advisers to oversee all aspects of national security from the White House,” Dreyfus blares in the lede. “It’s the most centralized decision-making I’ve ever seen,” one source tells him. G.W. Bush let Cheney and Rummy run the show and make all the decisions, Dreyfus reports, but not Obama. No sir. Obama is the, uh…decider in this administration.

Dreyfus manages to make Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times look like real journalists in comparison. His sources include “a well-connected defense and intelligence consultant,” “a senior Capitol Hill staffer,” “an insider,” “several insiders,” “one veteran of both the State Department and the Pentagon” and—perhaps the most credible voice in the article—“the Washington rumor mill.”

The piece’s named sources are so blatantly sleeping in the commander in chief’s tent that Dreyfus might as well have just asked Michelle who she thought was running the show. Leslie Gelb, who hasn’t been right about a single aspect of U.S. foreign policy from Vietnam on, avows that, “They’re making decisions there, at the White House. On everything.” Dreyfus paints National Security Adviser Jones as the kind of hard-boiled hawk the neocons better not mess with. “He’s pro nuclear” Dreyfus relates. “He likes oil drilling.” As if those right wing crackers credentials weren’t sufficiently malignant, Dreyfus throws in “He was on the boards of Boeing and Chevron.” Shudder.

William Cohen, whose chief accomplishment as Bill Clinton’s defense secretary was to hide in his office while his generals cocked up the Kosovo War, testifies that during his tenure he wanted James Jones on his team because “he knew where the bodies were buried, and I wanted to make sure that mine wasn’t among them.” It sounds like Cohen is still afraid enough of Jones to play ball with Obama’s spin merchants and make the guy sound like a Cheney-class leg breaker. Scary, huh kids?

From Dreyfus himself (supposedly) we hear that “The foreign policy vision that animates Obama and his team might be described best as a ‘Goldilocks’ approach: not too hot, not too cold. It’s a just-right philosophy.” Jesus, Larry and Curly. Do you think they had to waterboard Dreyfus to get him to paste that piffle into the article?

All this smoke about Obama’s national security team being large and in charge would be well and good except that they’ve already revealed themselves to be a team of bus riding Bozos. Their most spectacular pratfall has been their mumbling, bumbling, tumbling, fumbling Bananastan strategy. Get this:

During the campaign, Obama screws up and says that whatever success the surge in Iraq might have had (it really had none), it got in the way of putting enough troops into Afghanistan to “get the job done.” The Pentagon’s long war mafia chortles with glee, and the next thing you know, David McKiernan, the general in charge of the Bananastan bungle, says he needs at least 30,000 more troops for five more years or so. Gates and Mullen and the Joint Chiefs say, Yeah, yeah, he really, really needs those troops, give them to him, okay? So Obama asks the Joint Chiefs what they see as the “end game” in Afghanistan and they start staring at something a thousand yards behind Obama’s head. Obama calls McKiernan in Afghanistan and asks him what he plans to do with the 30,000 extra troops and McKiernan says, “Hey, somebody’s at the door.”

Then Obama hunkers down with his chess club, and they decide that the best compromise between doing nothing to doing something stupid is doing something half-baked. Obama agrees to send McKiernan a little over half the troops he wants—17,000—and tells his team to come up with a strategy for the generals who are apparently so busy fighting wars they can’t be bothered with planning them.

On March 17, Obama’s national security team releases the new strategy for the Bananastans; it’s an eye-watering compendium of fog, friction and humbug. It features an array of “realistic and achievable objectives,” none of which are realistic or achievable or particularly connected to national security.

The New York Times quoted “A dozen officials who were involved in the debate” as saying the new strategy does not involve nation building, even though its aims include things like “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and “developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” and “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” You know—nation building. The strategy also speaks of denying al Qaeda and other Islamofabulists “sanctuary” from which they can launch terror attacks. The notion that evildoers need a physical sanctuary is quainter than a tea cozy. Given the global proliferation of cheap communication equipment and even cheaper extremists eager to blow themselves to smithereens, the top terror guys can plan and execute attacks from a bleacher seat in the Himalayas or the Cannes Film Festival or the far side of the moon.

As Obama transitions from his 100-day honeymoon into his permanent bubble, I can’t help but wonder whether he knows he’s surrounded by fools and fanatics or if he’s been in the puzzle palace long enough now to have become as puzzled as everyone else in it.

Does he take what his loonies say seriously? I really want to think he puts on an elaborate show of listening to what they say, then shoos them out of the office, and calls up guys like al Maliki and says, “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.