Bull Feather Merchants Revisited

It ran in the Los Angeles Times so it’s official: the key to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s success in the Bananastans will be a “civilian surge.” The thinking apparently goes that if McChrystal stops killing as many Afghans as he used to when he was head of the secret Joint Special Operations Command, they’ll flock to his arms in gratitude.

It’s clear that no one in the national security establishment is serious about “winning” in the Bananastans, but they’re certainly serious about their war propaganda. In the old days, four-star generals like David Petraeus had personal public affairs colonels. McChrystal is so important he’s snagged himself a public affairs admiral: Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith. Like all military reporting now, the LAT piece, titled “U.S. to limit airstrikes in Afghanistan to help reduce civilian deaths,” is a poorly camouflaged piece of stenography, and it’s clear that Smith did the dictating.

Smith told the LAT that the civilian surge strategy will be outlined in a “tactical directive” that will order “new operational standards.” McChrystal, Smith says, will limit the use of airstrikes in order to “help cut down” on civilian casualties. This new direction came about as a result of the “listening tour” of Afghanistan that McChrystal took upon his arrival. “Listening tour” is a euphemism for the rounds a new boss makes to ensure everyone knows he doesn’t give a flying tackle what they think.

The LAT (i.e., Smith) reports that part of McChrystal’s plan to improve relationships with Afghans involves efforts to “speed up and sharpen the military's message in so-called information operations.” The real crux of his plan, however, involves information operations aimed at the American public.

The airstrike mantra is covering smoke. According to a UN report, airstrikes accounted for 64 percent of civilians killed by U.S. or Afghan forces in Afghanistan last year. Those civilians could just as easily have been killed by artillery or other heavy ground based weapons. Supporting fires are supporting fires, whether they come from land, sea or sky. A 19-year old private can kill just as many civilians with a grenade launcher as the 42-year old pilot of an F/A-18 Hornet can.

What’s more, a “staff member” told the LAT that, “the directive does not mean that use of air power will be sharply reduced—only that the emphasis is on protecting civilians rather than killing insurgents.” If the emphasis is on protecting civilians, why not stop airstrikes altogether? In my 20 years as an air operations planner, I never once designed a strike for the primary purpose of saving lives. In fact, why not halt air and ground based offensive actions completely? As best we can tell, we’ve killed about as many civilians as the Taliban have. Shoot, we can cut civilian deaths in half just by packing up and climbing on a plane for home.

McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, issued orders last year that required commanders to "minimize the need to resort to deadly force." How is this new directive on protecting civilians any different from the old orders on protecting civilians? According to the LAT/Smith/unnamed Smith underling, “McChrystal's directive appears to be more emphatic and specific.”

Ah!

But the new directive emphatically and specifically does not expect commanders to let their troops become sitting ducks. The LAT says that Smith says that McChrystal "made it very clear that if our troops find themselves in a situation where they are receiving fire from a location, if their lives are in danger, they'll have to address the problem as best they can, either with ground forces or close air support."

They’ll “address the problem” by blowing the location in question to smithereens. They have no other choice. Nothing in any superior’s orders overrides a commander’s authority and obligation to use all necessary means available to defend his unit, and no unit commander worth the market value of his precious bodily fluids is going to let a single troop in his charge be harmed in a firefight as the result of a pulled punch.

The LAT also says that Smith says that McChrystal says, "If it's a situation where clearly [hostile] individuals are in a structure or move into a structure . . . where you do not know precisely whether or not civilians are . . . in those structures and you can move away safely, you should do so."

Again, why bother going after “hostile” individuals at all if you’re going to withdraw the second you think there may be civilians in the vicinity? In the Bananastans, civilians will almost always be in the vicinity. McChrystal’s notion of separating the civilian population from the Taliban is the kind of lunacy you’d expect from a guy who only sleeps three hours a night. What he’s talking about is the precise equivalent of wading into Miami to separate Hispanics from Latinos.

Well, not the precise equivalent: in the Miami scenario, we would have a fair number of reliable Spanish speakers to provide us with good intelligence. We’ll never develop good intelligence in the Bananastans. Ever.

All the “change” hoopla attending Stan McChrystal’s arrival in Afghanistan is cynical hogwash, designed to sucker the American public into turning yet another corner, and sitting patiently through another Friedman unit, and listening to Thomas E. Ricks tell David Gregory or some other bobble-head that sure, what we’re doing is immoral, but it would be even more immoral not to do the immoral thing we’re doing.

The most immoral part of this travesty is that our military chain of command, right up to the commander in chief, continues to put our troops in a deplorable situation—to kill innocents or be killed themselves—for reasons that have nothing to do with national security whatsoever.

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 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.