Click and Clack and Play War

27 Sep. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I’ve said for some time that the biggest casualty of our woebegone Ism Wars may be our national cognizance.  The lines between intelligence, news, gossip, rumor and brainwash have faded like a hangover at happy hour, and the gap between reality and perception has never been greater.  Big Media has been the dutiful echo chamberlain for Big War for so long that it may never again be possible for Americans, by now hopelessly addicted to the slime from their TV sets, to clearly conceptualize the causes and consequences of our fist-first foreign policy. 

Leon Panetta and Mike Mullen
testify before the Senate.

During an INFOWAR opportunity last week, Leon “Uncle Leo” Panetta and Mike “Moon” Mullen, the Pentarchy’s Click and Clack, told the Senate Armed Services Clodhoppers that the recent attacks on the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan were the evildoing of a terror networks relationship with the intelligence service of Pakistan.

Senator Lindsey Graham
has always relied on the kindness
of campaign contributors in
the defense industry. 

Mullen, the son of a Hollywood publicity agent, followed standard operating procedure and weasel wordsmithed his way out of presenting anything anyone could call, strictly speaking, a “lie.”  He told Blanche Graham and Joe Liebfraumilch and Senator Ex-Prisoner of War that the Hagqani terrorist network “acts as” a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Internal Services Intelligence Agency aka “ISI.”  You can drive the flat earth theory through that kind of wiggle room.

Mullen didn’t offer any proof to back his claims other than to cite “credible intelligence.”  Hey, Abbott.  At what point since 9/11 have we had “credible” intelligence, civilian or military, in this country?  U.S. intelligence is to intelligence what McDonalds is to food.  Our intelligence consists of bribing or beating sources into telling us what we want to hear and/or weaving facts out of air molecules and selling them to Congress and the public in packages designed by Mullen’s bull-feather merchant marines.  

Mullen is invoking a variation on Don Rumsfeld’s one-percent doctrine.  If one percent of anything the likes of Mullen says is true—and one can reasonably infer that yes, Pakistan’s ISI is up to things they’d rather we didn't know about—then we have to buy the other 99 per-cent of their message too.  It’s kind of like the colossus cosmetics company that only allows retailers to carry its top-of-the-line products if said retailers also display said colossus cosmetics company’s crud-ola.  We only have one military, and if we don't allow it to defend us from the 99 percent of our enemies that they manufacture, they won’t protect us from the one percent that are real.

Uncle Leo hurled a healthy helping of hamana hem-and-haw onto the heap about how “we should put as much pressure as we can” on Pakistan, and then he cut to the chase and said that if Congress forces the Pentagon to cut its budget it will cause “catastrophic damage to the military.”  Uncle Leo didn’t bother to explain what “catastrophic damage” meant any more than Moon troubled himself to clarify what a “veritable arm” might be or how it might “act as” anything. 

When you take a fire hose to Click and Clack's cockamamie presentations, you get "we need more money so we can continue to send American troops to third world countries that pose no genuine threat to us to act as targets for our enemies there who increase in number every day we keep American troops in their countries."  Neither Click nor Clack nor anyone in Congress nor the newspapers bother to point out the obvious truth that thee enemies who are killing our troops would stop being enemies the moment we took our troops out of their country.  The only way they can kill our troops is if we deliver our troops to their doorstep.  Despite what young Mr. Bush's spin physicians used to tell us, the only way they can fight us over here is if they manage to jump or swim across the oceans.  

Let's play war!

Panetta and Mullen are engaged in something I identified in Bathtub Admirals as “play war.”   Intelligence weenies tell bathtub admirals and sandbox generals what they want to hear so they can play war, and fight among themselves for control of the toy ships and tanks and airplanes and melting plastic soldiers, and to see who can suck up to the bedroom politicians the most and become master of the known universe (aka “become King David Petraeus”).  Play war assumes many guises, from stacked “battle experiments” whose purpose is to prove the need for the newest and costliest weapons systems to wars against countries that don’t have militaries to toys and games that the warmongery fashions to make war seem no more real than reality television programming. 

The latest play war toy to surface in the “real world” is something called the “Obama Kills Osama” (aka “OKO”) action figurine.  It was supposedly cooked up by some kooks in China to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.  The figurine is cheesy to the point of obscenity.  The keyboard commandos who populate Military.com object to the figurine, but not because of its repellant portrayal of violence.  They don’t like it because it gives Obama credit for killing bin Laden, and not SEAL Team Six.  The repellent violence part they actually kind of like. 

On that note, here is a snippet from the work in progress on Sandbox Generals:  

            Calling the “enemy” World Wide Evil (aka WWE) was Flip’s idea and he stole it from World Wide Entertainment, the fake professional wrestling franchise.  The subconscious association Flip created exploited Americans' latent tendency to think of war the same way they thought of professional wrestling: as an entertainment.  The main difference between the two was that though Americans knew professional wrestling was fake they managed to sufficiently suspend their disbelief to respond to it emotionally as if it were real.  Americans knew that war, on the other hand, was real, but they tended to regard it as entertainment, and attached little emotion at all to it.  Even graphic pictures of babies horribly burned by sulfur bombs seldom moved Americans, whose minds had come to equate the war violence they observed in the news with the special effects they saw in movies and television and video games.

We have met the barbarians, and they are us.

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.

Fraud, Waste, and Standard Operating Procedure

20 Sep. 2011

By Jeff Huber

I’m not sure what made me think that taking time off to work on Sandbox Generals, (the sequel to Bathtub Admirals) would get me away from fixating on current headlines.  Last Saturday the thousands of days late and billions of dollars short New York Times editorial board ran an editorial excoriating  “Runaway Spending on War Contractors.” 

I owe it all to
Michael R. Gordon and
Judith Miller of the
New York Times.

“Tales of waste, fraud and mayhem by private contractors have been commonplace during 10 years of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the editorial they tell us.  “Now a Congressional study commission has put a ‘conservative’ estimate on waste of between $31 billion and $60 billion in the $206 billion paid to contractors since the start of the two wars.”  The rag-of-record’s editors also note that according to the study, “Excessive reliance on badly supervised private contractors indulging ‘vast amounts of spending for no benefit’ is the heart of the problem.”

Psst.  New York Times.  The heart of the problem is that Saddam Hussein wasn't trying to get yellowcake from Niger like you said he was back in 2002.  Are we supposed to get all het up by your editorial about contractors making big war bucks thanks to the propaganda you fed the country? 

Lamentably, we’ve been in a wartime economy since the Second World War on Evil, and even though that book-of-matches approach to fiscal policy is finally turning our fingers into Chicken McNuggets, there’s no alternative strategy that anyone is likely to implement.  Redirect all of that defense spending into domestic infrastructure project jobs that can’t be sent offshore because the workers have to be here to work on the infrastructure?  What for?  We’re still making money pig knuckle over ham hock on war.  Retooling an industry to make a new product when the old product is still profitable is a bad business decision.  Why do you think we’re still consuming oil and tobacco fumes? 

Here’s a sneak preview from this week’s labors on Generals, an Orwellian screed on how things got the way they are.  Be advised, this is a rough draft (!!!).    

The WWEIII (The Third World War on Evil, aka the Cold War on Evil aka the CWoE) everybody agreed to plan for but never have after everybody agreed not to blow up the world with nukes first centered on a WWEI style trench war with tanks in the middle of Europe.  But the action in the center ring was actually just a sideshow to justify the air and naval hootenannies that would break out like herpes everywhere else in the world. 

That was the war the Navy and the Air Force would fight, a peripheral war that actually had little to do with the stated Evil Empire objective of expanding its client state buffer to include Western Europe so as to ensure no more Hitlers or Napoleons would come along and destroy their armies and countries in a vain attempt to capture Moscow again.  Jack supposed that made the objective of us Americans and our little NATO (“Not A True Organization,” according to Jack) buddies was to ensure that another Hitler or Napoleon did come along and try to wreck the world in an attempt to capture Moscow.  That didn’t make any sense, Jack ceded, until you considered that the objective of global thermo nuclear-war between the ESSR (Empire of Semi-Socialist Republics) countries and the loose league of American customer states was to destroy the world before the other guys did. 

While the high-tech conventional war was peripheral to the opposing physical objectives of expanding or limiting Russia’s European real estate holdings, the war’s overall strategic objective quickly evolved into an economic one, a contest to which of the two diametrically smoke-and-mirror economic systems could outlast the other.  So seeing which economic system could develop and field and maintain the most outlandishly exorbitant air and sea weapon systems that would never actually be used for their designed purpose became the modus of combat in what Jack came to know of as “play war.”   

Both sides of the CWoE justified lavishing precious national wealth on extravagant weaponry by using it in the dirty little third world proxy wars they suckered each other into from time to time, in Korea and Vietnam and Bananastan and elsewhere, but pricey mayhem machines had little affect on the outcomes of these teakettle conflicts.  Third world wars were dumb soldier intensive affairs that mainly required low-dollar carbon-based air-breathing weapon systems largely procured from the lower and middle classes by means of conscription or the lure of stable employment with benefits. 

A key factor of top-drawer air and naval gizmology was not merely that it was expensive to produce, although it most certainly was.  The beauty part, the piece of resistance of all this, was that however much any given piece of this high-tech crap cost to make, it was boatloads more expensive to maintain, and the older it got, the more it cost to keep in operation.  Better yet was that the more a given gizmo cost to make and maintain, the longer it was expected to last, which made it even magnitudes more to make and oodles more to keep operating.  So if a flying submarine cost a butt-zillion Houdinis to make, it cost ten butt-zillion Houdinis to keep flying and diving for the thirty years it was supposed to last, at which time it would become eligible for a life extension overhaul that would screw it up so bad it would need two or three follow-on overhauls to fix the first one.  By the time the damn thing was finally turned into a museum in some coastal Podunk that needed a tourist attraction, the flying sub will have cost an amount roughly equivalent to what the Gross National Product was in the year it was built.

The Evil Empiricals followed the same general force strategy vector but in a somewhat different manner.  Their working class enlisted stiffs who maintained their gear weren’t nearly as well educated as our working class enlisted stiffs, so they built stuff three or four times as solid as it needed to be, realizing that when it broke it was broke-dick and nobody was going to fix it.  Hence, rather than spend more Carnacs trying to fix broke-dick stuff they just made new stuff. 

A by-product of that practice was that our intelligence weenies could say with a fair amount of accuracy (for a change) that they had a lot more stuff than we had, and we could turn that information around to justify building more expensive stuff to give ourselves the so called “technology edge” to bridge the “numerical superiority gap,” two buzz phrases that Flip often wished he’d been old enough to have originally stolen them from whoever their real originator had stolen them from.  It didn’t matter that their numerical superiority gap was a de facto hoax since more than 99 percent of their gear was rusting on the flight line, sinking at the pier, or burning in Chechnya. 

That’s not to say that our gear was all immaculate and purring like a fat tomcat getting its dick scratched.  Throughout our careers, when Jack and I went on play war deployments overseas, we were lucky if half of the jets in our air wing were fully mission capable (aka FMC)—i.e., they flew and all their radars and weapons and so on worked like they were supposed to—at any given time.  Squadron skippers typically reported a 75 percent FMC rate because reporting anything lower was like sinking the teeth of their careers into the chewy end of a shotgun barrel.  Maintenance supervisors knew this and ensured that by the end of any given day the paperwork would reflect a 75 percent FMC rate, even if the spare parts that would make a given aircraft FMC weren’t onboard the ship and wouldn’t arrive for weeks if ever. 

It must have been some time around the VWoE (Vietnam War on Evil) that air wing maintenance officers and ship supply corps gonifs cut the dope deal where as long as a part was on order everyone would pretend like it was on hand whether it was or not, thus making both the maintenance and supply pukes look good without actually having to do their jobs.  Squadron skippers looked the other way because phantom parting made them look good, and air wing commanders looked the other way because it made them look good too, and the same thing held true all the way up the chain of command.  And there was little fear that anyone would ever blow the whistle because everybody was in on the scam.

Postscript: Monday morning the PPPP (Pentarchy’s Primary Propaganda Platform) trotted out the crown jewel of the information campaign to preserve the defense budget.  “Retiree Benefits for the Military Could Face Cuts” reads the headline of a Times story that says if the Pentagon has to face fiscal reductions, the burden will fall on retirees, whose benefits the bull feather merchant marines are now calling a “social program.” 

The military’s spin physicians’ main assumption is that we can keep our present and future wars going with “support the troops” brainwash while we cut back on the support we promised the troops of our past wars.  That won’t hurt recruiting as long as the economy makes joining the military our nation’s most attractive career option.  If irony were alive and with us it would smirk at the fact that the head-sex fiends who cook up this scare tactic strategy will themselves get screwed if retiree benefit cuts come to pass. 

Mind you now, if we cut retiree benefits we’ll still have flying submarines, and stealth airplanes that are too expensive to actually use in wartime because they’ll shoot themselves down over enemy territory due to design flaws, and multi-billion dollar bomber drones that fly halfway across the world from mega-billion dollar aircraft carriers that are already halfway across the world. 

JLH 

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.

Postcard from the Beachhead

by Jeff Huber

13 Sep. 2011

Aloha, y’all:

The great thing about living at a beach is how much it simplifies one’s late summer vacation travel arrangements.  You don't have to go anywhere to take a vacation.  And you don't really have to quit working to take one either.  

Wake me when the
war is over.

Shady and I are enjoying the last of the summer sun here at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, though I’m still full steam ahead working on finishing the current draft of Sandbox Generals (we’re just now getting to the point in the narrative where Fix Felon regains the throne of the Pentarchy by eating King David alive, lending credence to protagonist Jack Hogan’s long held suspicion that Fix is, in fact, an undead mother groper).

And of course I’m keeping up with our woebegone wars—12 of them at last count.  I see over the weekend where Uncle Leo is foursquare behind keeping three or four thousand troops in Iraq beyond the year-end deadline.  Pentagon echo chamberlain Eric Schmitt of the New York Times tells us that Uncle Leo’s plan keeps considerably fewer troops in Iraq than “proposals presented at the Pentagon in recent weeks by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, to keep as many as 14,000 to 18,000 troops there.”

You sure have to wonder how Schmitt got that quote from Austin, and why he might stenograph it for us when he already got the “official” word from the “boss” that the “Pentagon” only wants to keep three or four thousand troops after the deadline.  Maybe if we only keep three or four thousand troops in harm’s way for the hopeless cause of supporting a corrupt government, it won’t seem so bad.  After all, that general man wanted to keep lots, lots more, didn’t he?

Oh, but then if we don't give the general as many troops as he wanted and things don’t go well, it will be somebody or other’s fault for not listening to what his generals said, won’t it?  

Our goal in the Arab world
 is Peace without
Humidity.

One also has to wonder what prompted Schmitt to write that the proposal to keep troops in Iraq until brown cows give chocolate milk reflects “the tension between Mr. Obama’s promise to bring all American forces home and the widely held view among commanders that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security.”  Schmitt doesn’t bother to mention that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security in spite (because?) of the fact the man in charge of training Iraqi security forces clear back in 2004 and 2005 was none other than our own, our very own Teflon General, "King" David Petraeus. 

Schmitt also doesn’t bother to pose the question of why, if miracle worker Petraeus’s Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria was so rootin’-tootin’-high-falutin' successful then how’s come we still gotta leave us troops there to get blowed up?  And Schmitt ponder the puzzler that if seven years weren’t enough for the Iraqis to get their own security act together, how many years will it take them?  (As many years as there are left?) 

Schmitt makes the vanishing Iraq deadline sound like news.  It’s nothing of the sort. The Pentarchy started its hell-no-we-won’t-go media campaign the second Candidate Obama made his 16-month withdrawal promise and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said why, sure, that sounded kosher to him.  Joint Chiefs Chairperson Mike Mullen went so far as to write an article in the summer of 2008 for Joint Force Quarterly, his personal glossy propaganda rag, that warned of the danger that a Democrat in the White House would pose to the mission in Iraq. 

And General Lloyd J. “Harrumph” Austin III’s proposal to keep 14 to 18 thousand troops in Iraq for an unspecified amount of time rhymes with General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno’s statement in early 2009 (via the "dean" of the Pentagon press prostitution ring Tommy Ricks) that he wanted to see 30,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq until 2004 or 2005.  Or so. 

Troop Tent Trollop Tommy was also the bull feather merchant chosen to throw a brass gauntlet in young Mr. Obama’s face in an early 2009 episode of Meet the Press, when he laid out the case to NBC fop David Gregory that Obama will have betrayed the troops if he withdraws them from Iraq against the generals’ wished because of a darn old campaign promise.

“Cave Man” Obama took a ten count vis-à-vis the New American Praetorians’ agenda a long time ago.  He won’t start standing up to them now.  Stand by to support the troops to your grave.  And theirs. 

I'll be posting here sporadically through the fall as I wrap up Sandbox Generals.  It's fun but taxing work.  Think 1984 meets Blazing Saddles. 

Ciao, hounds!  

Jeff

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.

Operational Pause for the Cause

Happy End of Summer!

I’m celebrating Labor Day this year by making it the first day of my summer vacation which, if I’m going to take one, I need to get cracking, don’t I?

Wake me when the next war
is over.

Catch you after the equinox.  Hopefully we won’t have started a fourth war by then.  Well, a fifth war, if you count Yemen as being a war already.  Which it is, when you get right down to it.  Then again, we’re also at war in Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.  So here’s hoping we’re don’t start a how ever many-eth war it would be if we start a new one before fall officially starts. 

And what would the rush be?  It’s not like we need new wars to replace the ones we already have.  Out withdrawal “deadlines” for Iraq and the Bananastans are more fictional than Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos, though not nearly so well written, drawn or inked.   

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance. 

Shock and Awe and Daylight Precision Bull Roar

30 Aug. 2011

by Jeff Huber

Parts I and II of “Post-Clasuwitzean Bebop in the New American Century” outlined the pathetic state of today’s American military intellect.  Part III describes how Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare evolved from fundamentally flawed air power theory.   

COIN (aka counterinsurgency) is the latest in a panorama of war dogmas that promise a new and better way to fight armed conflicts.  But COIN is actually a degenerative development in warfare philosophies, a return to manpower-intensive operations that high-dollar gizmos of destruction were supposed to have made obsolete. 

The collision between soldier-centric and gadget-driven conflicts began in the American Civil War and reached critical mass during World War I.  Napoleonic infantry tactics designed to break through lines of sword and musket defenders withered in the face of machine gun fire.  More than 10 million military personnel were killed in World War I and total military casualties topped 38 million, an unimaginable horror to Europeans who thought their races were far to civilized to ever allow such carnage to occur.  Little did they know at the time that they’d only seen a preliminary bout—total World War II deaths alone exceeded 60 million.    

The birth of air power theory.

World War I was combat airpower’s debutante ball.  Much ado was made (and still is) of the magnificent men in their flying machines derring that do that they did so well in the skies above the pathetic mud knockers slogging it out below.  But as a a senior U.S. Air Force officer once confessed to his airpower elective seminar at the U.S. Naval War College, “World War I did more for air power than air power did for World War I.”  What ended the trench war of attrition stalemate in that conflict was the late influx of American bodies that ensured the Central Powers would bleed white before Allied Powers did.  The flying circuses were sideshow performers. 

Interwar air power advocates like Billy Mitchell, Giulio Duhet and Hugh Trenchard pandered the “strategic bombing” doctrine that advocated use of bomber aircraft to defeat enemy states by destroying their economic infrastructure and their publics’ will to wage war rather than battling their armies and navies.  To this day the goal of air power psychopathy is to make all other forms of warfare obsolete and to redirect the budgets of armies and navies into air services’ coffers. 

Strategic bombing theory suffered from a number of famously flawed assumptions.  First among them is the dictum that “the bomber will always get through,” a maniacal mantra first mouthed by Sir Stanley Baldwin in the late 1920s that promised bombers would always be able to defeat air defenses and destroy enemy cities.  That philosophy alone had sufficient holes to guarantee that air power would never live up to its hype.  

Let's make that, "The bomber will sometimes
get through."

The 8^th Air Force bombing campaigns in Europe gave us a veritable entertainment franchise chronicling the adventures of bomber crews shot down over Nazi Germany who spent the duration of the war trying to escape from a Luft Stalag.  What would post-modern life be without our fond memories of Steve McQueen bouncing his baseball against the wall of the “cooler,” or of William Holden organizing mouse races, or of Bob Crane threatening to pull some stunt that would get Werner Klemperer transferred to the Russian front? 

The preponderance of Allied air casualties came about as a result of the daylight precision bombing concept, which was itself flawed in multiple respects.  The most incongruous of these flaws was the assumption that heavily armed B-17 flying fortresses would be as able to defend themselves against enemy fighters during the day as well as they could at night, a notion spawned in an era when fighter aircraft were strictly visual combatants and did not fly at night.  Daylight precision bombing also assumed that the B-17s’ super-duper Norden bombsights could consistently put bombs on their assigned targets.  That assumption blithely ignored easily anticipated probabilities like changes in wind direction between the bomber and the target, clouds and fog and haze obscuring the targets, bombardiers not recognizing the target, and so on. 

The public's will to wage war.

“Conventional” strategic bombing did manage to destroy cities in World War II, Dresden and Tokyo being two of the most horrifying examples.  But this type of bombing—also called “terror bombing”—failed to destroy the publics’ will to wage war.  In fact, the publics’ will is seldom a factor in totalitarian nations like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or even in so-called liberal democracies like today’s America where state-of-the-art propaganda distributed through the mass media has seduced the public into a state of bovine torpor.  The only known instances of successful terror bombing were the 9/11 attacks that goaded malleable Americans into going along with ill-advised invasions of countries that had nothing to do with the attacks. 

Asserting that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war in the Pacific is like saying that Julius Caesar died from a massive injection of tetanus bacteria.  The Japanese had already been defeated through a years-long series of horrible land and naval campaigns.  A very good argument, and one that I subscribe to, says that Hirohito would have forced his government to surrender without the need for atomic operations if we had communicated to him via back channels that he could stick around as emperor, which was what we apparently planned to do all along.  (Please note that the argument over whether the nuclear option was necessary with Japan is a separate issue from whether or not nuking the two Japanese cities was moral or legal.  If I'd been in President Truman’s shoes and thought that dropping the nukes would save a single G.I.'s life, I would have dropped them too.)

Air power made its greatest contribution to the war in Europe when General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, supreme commander of the European Theater of Operations, ordered the 8^th Air Force to switch its priorities from strategic bombing to operational support of the Normandy Invasion and the subsequent land offensives that led to the defeat of the Wehrmacht, which Ike correctly identified as the German’s center of gravity.   

In instance after instance since World War II, airpower’s useful contributions have consisted not of independent, strategic bombing but of strikes in support of ground and naval operations.  We’ve seen that as recently as our Libyan lark; strikes against infrastructure and regime “target sets” had little impact.  It was only when air power was used in support of rebel offensives that balls started dropping into pockets.

Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare are little more than a 21^st century take on strategic bombing theory.  GPS guided munitions replace the Norden bombsight and computers replace the bombardiers, but the strategic effect remains nil. 

Next: A COINfederacy of Dunces

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance. 

Reports of my demise...

...are as accurate as the hysteria the media created and continue to fan about Tropical Punch Irene. I'm posting from Starbucks. Tomorrow's column may be a bit late.

Here's something I submitted to the Vagina-Pilot this morning:

"After days of media manufactured hysteria, Irene was a tropical storm at worst by the time she reached Hampton Roads.  Yet Irene caused our three-ring power company to leave upwards of a half-million of us in the dark for extended periods.  My densely populated Virginia Beach neighborhood was without power until the wee hours of Monday morning.

"You’re doing a heck of a job, Dominion.  Will a single head roll over our power giant’s dismal failure during a weather event that should barely have stressed it? Probably not.  The exec responsible for this fiasco is no doubt the same character who’s in charge of implementing our next rate hike.

"There is, of course, plenty of shame to go around in Irene’s wake. As of sunrise on Monday, Cox Communication still hadn’t restored communication to my neighborhood.

 "Don’t you just love monopolies?"

J    

All that Clausewitz Jazz

23 August 2011

by Jeff Huber

Part two of “Post-Clausewitzean Bebop in the New American Century” reprises themes from some of my older foreign policy routines.  Lamentably, if you’re old enough to read this, their pertinence will persist through your lifetime and probably your grandchildren’s as well.

War Wizards

If you think that what generals and war wags say in the media only sounds like gibberish to you because you have no military experience, you’re wrong.  It sounds like gibberish because it is gibberish. 

Analysts, scholars, old soldiers who won’t fade away and other gee-wizards who claim to be versed in the military arts and sciences agree on the importance of the Clausewitzean center of gravity concept, but none of them agree on what a center of gravity is.  An Air Force pilot will tell you the center of gravity is anything he can drop a bomb on, so you need to buy him a lot of $2 billion bombers so he can bomb all the centers of gravity.  A naval aviator will tell you the center of gravity is always the aircraft carrier; a Navy SEAL will tell you the center of gravity is always him.  A Marine major will tell you there can only be one center of gravity but that’s because Marines can only remember one thing at a time.  An intelligence officer will tell you the center of gravity is a secret, and if you ask an Army general what a center of gravity is he’ll start breathing through his mouth.

The center of gravity concept is a lot simpler than Pavlov's dogs of war would like you to believe.  “The point against which all our energies should be directed,” as Clausewitz described it, should be directly tied to our objective, the prime determinant of all acts of war.  Without a clearly defined objective, war is loosely orchestrated but pointless violence—a description that, not surprisingly, precisely defines our present armed shenanigans in Libya, Iraq, the Bananastans and elsewhere.   

Our center of gravity is the thing that can achieve our objective and the enemy’s center of gravity will be the thing that can thwart us from achieving it.  The purpose of tying what we call centers of gravity to objectives is what keeps us focused on the objective.  When we start prosecuting “centers of gravity” that don’t directly relate to our purpose we get in big trouble.

Will the real center of gravity please stand up?

Not surprisingly, “floating” centers of gravity, and a printer’s plethora of them, have become a trademark of our Long War on Ism.  Since 9/11, centers of gravity identified by America’s war wisenheimers have included Saddam Hussein, his Republican Guard, his air defense system, his command and control system, Baghdad, his sons (Hoodoo and Voodoo? I forget), his weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, his ties to al Qaeda that didn’t exist either, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in Pakistan, al Qaeda in Yemen, al Qaeda in general, Shiite militias, Sunni militias, militia leaders, militia leaders’ followers, the Iraqi people, the Afghan people, the American people, the Pakistani people, the supply lines that run through Pakistan, Pakistan itself, Iran, the news media, world opinion, Congress and the poppy crop.  

You don't need to be an expert in all that Clausewitz jazz to figure that centers of gravity are like priorities; if everything is a priority there really are no priorities.  Warfare wisenheimers who tell you otherwise are whistling out their fat dumb toot chutes.  A good 90 percent of the people you see pawning themselves off in the media as experts on the art of war don’t know a center of gravity from their elbows and, more horribly, the tank thinkers who actually cook up our war fighting doctrines don’t either.  All any of these yahooligans know of Clausewitz consists of bite-size buzz phraseology passed down from one generation of clueless combat theorist to the next, and most of them think Sun Tzu’s prime directive is to “Baffle them with bullroar.” 

Our New American Century’s strategic brain trust has produced three major post-modern military doctrines: Shock and Awe, Network Centric Warfare and COIN (aka “counterinsurgency”).  Shock and Awe and Network Centric Warfare are related military “transformation” dogmas that promise to scare and/or confuse the enemy into submission with a top-dollar concoction of Buck Rogers gadgetry and magical mystery mantras like “full spectrum dominance” and “rapid dominance” and “information dominance” and “dominant battlefield awareness” and “dominant maneuvers” and the “net-centric collaboration” of a “self-synchronized” and robust  "network of networks" that produces a “shared situational awareness” as a systemic element of its “organizational behavior.” 

Fred Kagan can't stomach
Shock and Awe, but COIN?
Yummmmmm!

Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare were the cornerstones of our blitz on Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom lo those many years ago.  All they netted us were sticker shock and a good-old-boy network-of-networks that still knocks down big war bucks selling us fecal weapons systems that have proven utterly ineffective at promoting the national security.  Even neocon warlord Fauntleroy Fred Kagan, bastard stepfather of the Iraq surge, admits that these two space-age “warfare theories” have succeeded in combat but failed in war.  In an August 2003 Policy Review article titled “War and Aftermath” Freddie warned us to “beware technology that disconnects war from politics” and confessed that neither Network-Centric Warfare nor Shock and Awe  “provides a reliable recipe for translating the destruction of the enemy’s ability to continue to fight into the accomplishment of the political objectives of the conflict.”   

It was mighty big of Freddie to tell us that the Pentagon had screwed up the great idea he and his fellow neocon-men had to invade Iraq, but he actually had a hidden agenda: namely, to further engulf us in ever-deepening quagmires through the a counter revolution in military affairs dogma called COIN, which has proven to be the biggest lie that martial masterminds have told us since they said air power would make war itself obsolete. 

Next: Warlord Fauntleroy, King Rat and the Desert Ox.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance. 

Post-Clausewitzean Bebop in the New American Century

16 Aug. 2011

by Jeff Huber

This is the first part of an extended essay on post-modern American imperialism. 

A 21st century sound bite summarizing the work of 19^th century Prussian philosopher Carl von Clausewitz says that war is the pursuit of policy goals through violence.  And the nutshell version of the ancient Chinese martial sage Sun Tzu admonishes us to charge downhill, not uphill.  How ironic it is, then, that in the neoconservative age, history’s most powerful nation pursues a policy of persistent violence for no reason that one could imagine a rational nation might pursue, and does so with strategies that consistently charge uphill when downhill alternatives abound.  Even more of a wry puzzle is that the nation that spends more on weaponry and its supporting gizmology than the rest of the world combined is locked in a seemingly eternal stalemate with adversaries who have no defense budget whatsoever.

Let them eat merde.

History is rife with examples of empires that became footnotes in later empires’ histories because they lacked the wisdom to understand that the might of arms that brought them to glory was insufficient alone to sustain them, and that the inability to adeptly exercise other forms of power would turn their military prowess into the vulnerability that would prove their downfall.

To deliberately misquote Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes mighty often.  The present point in our American saga resonates of the sick wet sound of imperial titans of yore flopping belly first on their own swords.  Two of the most pertinent case studies in this regard are the Napoleonic and Roman Empires.      

From 1789 to 1799 the French staged a bloody revolution to establish a republic and free themselves of an oppressive absolute monarchy that had reigned for centuries.  Within five years they had placed themselves under the rule of a warlord emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.  In the name of preserving the French democracy he had already snuffed, Napoleon set about conquering all of Europe.  Napoleon ruled his extended domain with brass-knuckled brutality, imposing draconian economic sanctions and other “soft power” measures designed, it seems in retrospect, to compel his satellite states to revolt against him and his puppets. 

Napoleon made a Théâtre de l'Absurde display of diplomatic attempts to keep things going the way he liked, but he wasn’t any good at it.  As a Naval War College professor once put it, Napoleon liked to do what he was good at, which was shoot all the horses and then put on his lead boots and start kicking.  Napoleon kept kicking until his dead ponies finally reached up and bit him in the âne.  The universal animus held against the French is a direct result of Napoleon’s fist-first foreign policies; to this day the French make the Germans seem cuddly in comparison. 

As empire builders are wont to do, Napoleon over reached his financial and military limits.  Casual history buffs know of his final defeat in 1815 by Britain’s Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. But what really undermined Napoleon’s hegemony was the Peninsular War (1807-1814), the counterinsurgency quagmire he stumbled into on The Iberian Peninsula.  With help from Britain, Spain and Portugal were able to conduct a guerilla warfare campaign against French occupation that eroded Napoleon’s resources and led to his ultimate downfall. 

12 years of Napoleonic Wars left an unstable Europe, and a France that was long on arrogance but short on anything to be arrogant about and that would need to be bailed out of two world wars by an upstart nation on another continent.

The ancient Romans punted away their republic for a “dictator in perpetuity” named Julius Caesar, a self-promoting wartime general whose victories had made Rome a global power.  Caesar met an untimely end when he collided with a legislature’s worth of vintage Italian cutlery, but his adopted son Augustus carried on the line of “unitary executives” and the Romans continued to live by the sword until they died from it.  Rome’s military, especially the Praetorian Guard, became the empire’s predominant political faction.  As renaissance political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli noted, the Praetorians became “insolent and formidable, not only to the senate but to the emperors themselves.”

No emperor could survive, much less rule, without the allegiance and support of the Praetorian Guard and the Legions.  If the Guard didn't like an emperor, they whacked the guy.  Though the Senate continued to be an equal branch of government in name it was really just a vehicle through which emperors exercised an autocratic power that was, in fact, the bidding of the military.

Dick Cheney institutionalizes
American "cement shoes"
diplomacy. 

The military’s financial shenanigans wrecked Rome’s economy, and infighting among segments of the Guard and Legions led to the break-up of the empire.  By Machiavelli’s day, Italy was a surly collection of warring principalities whose exploits resembled, not altogether surprisingly, a season summary of The Sopranos.  Lack of political unity and the unholy meddling of the Catholic Church in state affairs transformed once mighty Italy into the court jester of the international stage.  Upon learning that Italy had thrown in with Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill quipped, “It’s only fair.  We had to have them in the last war.” 

The New American Centurions, the neoconservatives, aim to ensure U.S. domination of the world through military occupation and persistent low-level armed conflict.  They manipulate the support of a largely passive population through a combination of fear of the ubiquitous “them,” myopic patriotism and religious fervor—a propaganda cocktail of stars-and-stripes-and-Jesus-versus-the-evildoers-forever.  Our legislature has ceded virtually every one of its powers—except the ones that allow its members to draw salaries, benefits and retirements—to a unitary executive, and the conservatively slanted Supreme Court is all too happy to help construct a post-modern America that is a republic in name only, a thinly disguised autocracy in which the executives are every bit the handmaiden of their country's warmonger as Roman emperors were.  

Our lavish martial expenditures—by some credible analyses total military related spending accounts for more than half of the federal budget—have our world’s largest economy heading nose first for the bottom of the pool.  What little diplomacy we practice is of the “make them an offer they can’t accept” variety.  We insist on negotiating conditions that no one in their right minds would accept, then we say we tried diplomacy and it didn’t work and we revert back to Plan A. 

Neocon military strategist
Fred Kagan

Armed force is the only foreign policy tool we know how to use, and its effectiveness has diminished through the vanishing point and emerged on the counterproductive scale.  Our military endeavors not only can’t defeat our enemies, they actually create more enemies.  We conduct our wars according to doctrines like Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare and COIN (aka Counterinsurgency) that can best described as post-Clausewitzean bebop theory, strategies so convoluted and self-contradicting that the lysergically inspired brainiacs who conjured them up can’t even explain them to each other.  Today’s American cannons of armed conflict are guidelines not to win wars, but to insure that then never end.

If America avoids fading away into history’s appendix of asterisk items, it will only be because the rest of the world realizes that we are too big to fail: If we perish from the face of the earth, who will buy everybody else’s exports?

Next: All that Clausewitz Jazz

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.