Grand Strategy for a Divided America

[cupper]

My money is on Ken Cuccinelli. ;D

:rofl:

May as well send it to me now. :nod:

 

[tomahawk6]

Seriously with that many kids he needs a good job with great benefits. ;D

 

[cupper]

Well, if Gov. McDonnell is any example, you can make a great living from the benefits of being Governor. Just don't piss off the Chef.

 

[pbi]

This could be an interesting race.

I lived in VA for a while, near Quantico. IMHO while you would naturally assume VA to be a GOP state, I'm not sure it's painted with one brush: even wth one GOP brush.

When I lived there (97-98) the north part of the state where I lived was heavily suburbanized with many of the residents being Govt and Beltway folks who didn't have long standing connections to the state or to "Southern" culture. It was much more diverse than I expected. I was surprised, for example, to see signs in Spanish and in English in the supermarket.
It seemed more like Pennsylvania with grits and fried chicken than like "Gone With the Wind".

But, if you went not very far south or southwest in the state, it felt much more like the South that Canadians might think of, particularly in the areas around Fredericksburg and towards the mountains.

 

[cupper]

I've been in VA since 2001 and if anything it has only gotten more so polarized with the more populous Democratic leaning Norther Virginia (DC burbs) and Virginia Beach / Hamton Roads areas growing in population size and electoral power relative to the more conservative GOP leaning rest of the state.

You will still find significant pockets of GOP districts within these two areas, but they tend to be from the right end of the Tea Party conservative spectrum. I've noted lately that there are a large number of Tea Party "Don't Tread on Me" License Plates showing up on the roads around here (Northern VA).

 

[pbi]

When I was living there I belonged to the Dumfries-Triangle Volunteer Fire Dept. The folks in the dept were almost all "old stock" residents whose families had lived there before the suburban sprawl began to swallow up Prince William County. They were mostly the archetypal "good ol' boys", but they were disheartened and somewhat alienated by the rapid changes happening in the places they grew up in. They felt that people like themselves with a strong sense of community ("real" Southerners) were being replaced by a bunch of commuter types who didn't really belong and sure as hell weren't going to volunteer their time to protect the community they were commuting from.

Maybe this is along the lines of the polarization you referred to.

 

[mariomike]

When I was living there I belonged to the Dumfries-Triangle Volunteer Fire Dept.

I looked at the DTVFD website and was very impressed. Especially by the crew quarters. Five star compared to anything we had. Although we didn't get to spend much time in them anyway.

<snip> a bunch of commuter types who didn't really belong and sure as hell weren't going to volunteer their time to protect the community they were commuting from.

Or, commuting into.

Either way, it sounds familiar. When I hired on there was a residency requirement.

It meant manpower would be readily available in case of emergency, and that by living there you had a better "feel" of the many city neighborhoods and their diverse communities.

That you would take more pride and interest in the results of your work if your own family lived there.

But, that was later struck down in arbitration. I believe the high cost of housing in the city was cited as the main reason.

One can only imagine some of the places guys now on 24-hour tours commute from!

Cheers.





 

 

[cupper]

Actually Mike, most of the commuter traffic is going from Prince William into DC / Pentagon / NoVA Government facilities.

Urban sprawl has boomed since I first moved down, and my 30 minute commute to my office just outside the beltway is mild compared to most. And it's mainly on 2 lane back roads, rather than I-95 or I-66.

It's true that many of the municipal employees in Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax have to drive in from PW and further because rental and house prices were unaffordable on city worker salaries, and they needed to move further out into the burbs. It became a death spiral as growth moved further out, and the housing bubble grew, pushing people further and further away from their work place.

There are people who drive in from West Virginia, a 2 to 3 hour commute at rush hour, each way, simply because the housing is more affordable west of the Blue Ridge.

 

[mariomike]

There are people who drive in from West Virginia, a 2 to 3 hour commute at rush hour, each way, simply because the housing is more affordable west of the Blue Ridge.

And I thought the GTA was bad. 

As you probably know, Residency Requirements in American cities have been a political issue for years.

The theory being that city neighborhoods are safer with their emergency services living there while off-duty. It also keeps their salaries within city limits.

Not surprisingly, the unions are opposed to the residency laws.

Pittsburgh will be having a referendum on it next month:
http://www.post-gazette.com/neighborhoods-city/2013/07/23/Pittsburgh-Council-authorizes-referendum-on-police-residency/stories/201307230203

 

[cupper]

Since the market collapse some local governments in this area have taken to providing subsidies and interest free loans to city employees to purchase houses within the jurisdiction rather than opt for the long commute. It helped address the glut of foreclosed homes on the market as well.

 

[mariomike]

Since the market collapse some local governments in this area have taken to providing subsidies and interest free loans to city employees to purchase houses within the jurisdiction rather than opt for the long commute. It helped address the glut of foreclosed homes on the market as well.

Similar to the Retention Pay up here.

It encourages "seasoned" members of the emergency services  ( many with skills in Special Operations ) to remain in the city rather than transferring their skills to an out-of-town service in a lateral move.

This saves the City the expense of having to recruit and train replacements up to their skill level.

Cheers.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Despite what Arvind Subramanian in an article posted in the Chinese superthread, the RMB is, most likely still some way away from displacing the US dollar as the global reserve currency but the authoritative Financial Times worries, in an editorial, that the US is squandering its political and real capital and "by [any] yardstick, the US is floundering. Behind confidence in the full faith and credit of the US lies global trust in US democracy." The full editorial is reproduced here under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5d97f272-3d6f-11e3-b754-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl

A superpower at risk of slippage
The dollar still reigns but underlying confidence is shaken

October 25, 2013

It has been 10 days since the US government shutdown came to an end. And if the bond market were your guide, there would appear to be no lasting costs – the 10-year US Treasury yield dipped below 2.5 per cent this week for the first time since August.

Yet beneath the surface, Washington’s flirtation with a voluntary default has shaken confidence in American political institutions. There may be no immediate rival to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Markets are more preoccupied by prospects of a delay to the Federal Reserve’s tapering plans. But as John Kerry, US secretary of state, said this week, the world is now monitoring the US to see when it will recover its senses. It cannot afford to make a habit of political recklessness.

The fact that Washington is undergoing a crisis of will, rather than ability, is not particularly reassuring. There is no question that the Treasury’s has capacity to service US obligations. At about 75 per cent of gross domestic product, publicly held US debt is entirely manageable – and less than a third of that of Japan. And the US fiscal deficit is on course to drop below 4 per cent of GDP next year.

But the possibility that it may generate yet another fiscal showdown as soon as January or February is on everyone’s minds. Last week a senior Chinese official called on the world to “de-Americanise”. Neither the Chinese renminbi nor the euro are in a position to supplant the US dollar, which still accounts for more than 60 per cent of global reserves. But governments and private investors are far more alert to possible alternatives than before. History is littered with solid objects – and riskless assets – that have melted into thin air.

There are two further costs to America’s rumbling domestic crisis that are equally hard to measure. As Einstein once quipped, not everything that counts can be counted. The first is to America’s reputation. Bill Clinton observed that the US should lead by the power of its example, rather than the example of its power.

By that yardstick, the US is floundering. Behind confidence in the full faith and credit of the US lies global trust in US democracy. However, the international impact of Washington’s dysfunction is increasingly tangible. Last month China exploited President Barack Obama’s absence from Asian trade meetings to launch a non-US initiative of its own. And the US government shutdown delayed the critical second round of transatlantic trade talks. Many important bureaucratic functions were put on ice, including monitoring of financial sanctions on Iran and work on fundamental scientific research. As Mr Kerry pointed out, he “could feel and breathe” the world’s doubts about US democracy in his meetings with counterparts.

Second, the shutdown has further sapped confidence in the US recovery. Last week the delayed jobs figures for September showed that the US labour market looks once again to be stalling. US consumer confidence also dipped to its lowest level in almost a year. And the shutdown has shaved at least 0.25 per cent from US fourth-quarter growth forecasts.

The world continues to hang on every word of the Fed, which remains the only functional economic game in town. The chances are that it will delay tapering until March after Janet Yellen, the nominee to replace Ben Bernanke, has taken over.

Assuming Capitol Hill does not block her confirmation, Ms Yellen will quickly need to show she is in the driving seat. It would therefore be a great help to her – and to a warily observant world – if Congress could keep the car on the road between now and then. There is more at stake here than mere reputation. The status of superpower carries responsibility too.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013

The wounds to America's power ~ and its economic power is every bit as important as its military power ~ are self inflicted. Americans are kicking America's ass.

 

[Edward Campbell]

According to this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The New York Times, the Obama administration is attempting a "mid-course correction" on the Middle East (writ largely, one hopes) under the direction of National Security Adviser Susan Rice:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/middleeast/rice-offers-a-more-modest-strategy-for-mideast.html?hp&_r=0

Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast

By MARK LANDLER

Published: October 26, 2013

WASHINGTON — Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region.

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.

That includes Egypt, which was once a central pillar of American foreign policy. Mr. Obama, who hailed the crowds on the streets of Cairo in 2011 and pledged to heed the cries for change across the region, made clear that there were limits to what the United States would do to nurture democracy, whether there, or in Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia or Yemen.

The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him.

“We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,” she said, adding, “He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

For Ms. Rice, whose day job since she started July 1 has been a cascade of crises from Syria to the furor over the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities, the review was also a way to put her stamp on the administration’s priorities.

The debate was often vigorous, officials said, and its conclusions will play out over the rest of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Scrawling ideas on a whiteboard and papering the walls of her office with notes, Ms. Rice’s team asked the most basic questions: What are America’s core interests in the Middle East? How has the upheaval in the Arab world changed America’s position? What can Mr. Obama realistically hope to achieve? What lies outside his reach?

The answer was a more modest approach — one that prizes diplomacy, puts limits on engagement and raises doubts about whether Mr. Obama would ever again use military force in a region convulsed by conflict.

For Ms. Rice, 48, who previously served as ambassador to the United Nations, it is an uncharacteristic imprint. A self-confident foreign policy thinker and expert on Africa, she is known as a fierce defender of human rights, advocating military intervention, when necessary. She was among those who persuaded Mr. Obama to back a NATO air campaign in Libya to avert a slaughter of the rebels by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

But Mr. Obama drove the process, officials said, asking for formal briefings in the Situation Room and shorter updates during his daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office. He gave his advisers a tight deadline of the United Nations’ speech last month and pushed them to develop certain themes, drawing from his own journey since the hopeful early days of the Arab Spring.

In May 2011, he said the United States would support democracy, human rights and free markets with all the “diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.” But at the United Nations last month, he said, “we can rarely achieve these objectives through unilateral American action — particularly with military action.”

Critics say the retooled policy will not shield the United States from the hazards of the Middle East. By holding back, they say, the United States risks being buffeted by crisis after crisis, as the president’s fraught history with Syria illustrates.

“You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The argument that we can’t make a decisive difference, so we’re not going to try, is wrongheaded.”

Other analysts said that the administration was right to focus on old-fashioned diplomacy with Iran and in the Middle East peace process, but that it had slighted the role of Egypt, which, despite its problems, remains a crucial American ally and a bellwether for the region.

“Egypt is still the test case of whether there can be a peaceful political transition in the Arab world,” said Richard N. Haass, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But here, the administration is largely silent and seems uncertain as to what to do.”

The White House did not declare the Egyptian military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi last July a coup, which would have required cutting off all aid to the government. Instead, it signaled its displeasure by temporarily holding up the delivery of some big-ticket military equipment, delegating the announcement to the State Department.

Ms. Rice and other officials denied that Egypt had been sidelined, arguing that the policy was calculated to preserve American influence in Cairo. They also said the United States would continue to promote democracy, even if there were limits on what it could do, not to mention constraints on what the president could ask of a war-weary American public. “It would have been easy to write the president’s speech in a way that would have protected us from criticism,” said Philip H. Gordon, the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council. “We were trying to be honest and realistic.”

Mr. Gordon took part in the Saturday sessions, along with two of Ms. Rice’s deputies, Antony J. Blinken and Benjamin J. Rhodes; the national security adviser to the vice president, Jake Sullivan; the president’s counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco; a senior economic official, Caroline Atkinson; and a handful of others.

It was a tight group that included no one outside the White House, a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review in 2009, which involved dozens of officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Rice said she briefed Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over weekly lunches.

Some priorities were clear. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran presents the West with perhaps its last good chance to curb its nuclear program. Mr. Rouhani has a mandate to ease sanctions on Iran and has signaled an eagerness to negotiate.

But other goals appear to have been dictated as much as by personnel as by policy. After vigorous debate, the group decided to make the Middle East peace process a top priority — even after failing to broker an agreement during the administration’s first term — in part because Mr. Kerry had already thrown himself into the role of peacemaker.

More than anything, the policy review was driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to turn his gaze elsewhere, notably Asia. Already, the government shutdown forced the president to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia — a decision that particularly irked Ms. Rice, who was planning to accompany Mr. Obama and plunge into a part of the world with which she did not have much experience.

“There’s a whole world out there,” Ms. Rice said, “and we’ve got interests and opportunities in that whole world.”

It is interesting to note that this "mid-course correction" is being done, apparently, without (direct, face-to-face) inputs from the Defence or State Departments.

I doubt that George W Bush's "freedom agenda" was a sound base for a strategy and I am, somewhat, heartened to read that "it (the Rice plan) does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest." America does have vital, core interests in North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia but I never thought "democracy," as we understand it is a good fit for the regions at this time.

 

[tomahawk6]

The administration has chosen to punish the Egyptian military for ousting the MB by cutting funding.The MB is not a friend to the West.Fortunately the Saudi's have stepped in to make up for the funding shortfall.

 

[a_majoor]

Unless and until the political class changes greatly, I doubt we will see any improvement soon. From Instapundit this morning:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit

ROGER SIMON: Obama Should Be Impeached . . . For Cluelessness. “When I read Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama was ‘unaware’ until last summer that the U. S. spied on thirty-five world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, I was frankly stupefied. No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels. What exactly does our president do for a living? What’re we paying him for?”

He reigns, but does not rule. He leaves the actual work to the likes of Valerie Jarrett, people formidable enough in their milieu but rather narrow in skills and knowledge.

Of course since most politicians are "professional" politicians and their staffers are equally "professional" (often having done nothing else in their adult lives) the idea that they are quite narrow in skills and knowledge is perfectly understandable. Breaking "professional" politicians might involve such things as term limits, undoing "gerrymandered" districts and a cultural shift back to the idea that politics is an interlude in the lives of otherwise accomplished professionals (sorry gang, but the need to have a recognizable name, heavy CV and ability to raise resources means that middle class wage earners are to be fighting a huge uphill battle no matter what).

"How" to get there is an interesting question in of itself....

 

[Edward Campbell]

And Moody's reports that it isn't just the US Government and the US consumer who are too deep in debt ... it's Corporate America, too:

The economy matters: America's strategy ... grand strategy, military strategy, etc ... must be paid for, eventually. Right now America's strategy is in hock to the Chinese.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The Economist is a useful article which ends with a quote from Adm (ret'd) Michael Mullen, former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I am tired," Adm (ret'd) Mullin says "of interventionists picking up a stick without a strategy, without knowing the political and diplomatic outcome.”

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21590103-two-difficult-wars-offer-compelling-lessons-uses-force

Special report: America's foreign policy

The uses of force
Two difficult wars offer compelling lessons

Nov 23rd 2013

From the print edition

“AMATEURS TALK STRATEGY, professionals talk capacity.” Jeremy Shapiro, who recently left the State Department to join the Brookings Institution in Washington, has put his finger on a central question for foreign policy. For the liberal, open-market system to endure is in America’s interest—and in the general interest, too. America does not yet face a direct challenge from China and Russia. But as the dominant power it must be able and willing to maintain the system, or norms will fray and tensions grow. Does it have the capacity?

The question forces itself on policymakers just now because the demands placed on American primacy have changed. In the cold war, explains John Ikenberry, an academic, America provided security and other services to many countries. But the threat is no longer so great and security is therefore no longer so valuable. For many countries in large parts of the world, the past decade has been not about war and financial crisis but about peace and prosperity. Those countries want more of a say.

At the same time, according to Moisés Naím of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the old centres of power, including governments, have less room for manoeuvre. Their authority to dictate values and behaviour has been undermined by a profusion of new political actors and interest groups who are mobile and connected.

Some conclude that in such a world dominance is impossible: there are too many actors with the power to block anything they dislike. The rest of this special report will examine how far that is true by looking at the components of American primacy—sharp military power, sticky economic power and the sweet power of American values—before drawing some conclusions about how America should act. In each case, as Mr Shapiro has observed, the starting point is capacity.

Seen from Washington, the main threat to America’s armed forces is to be found not in Helmand or Hainan but in the automatic budget cuts of the sequester. This roughly doubles the savings that will have to come from the Pentagon’s budget in the next nine years, to about $1 trillion.

During the summer Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary, mapped out a possible first round of cuts: shrinking the army by up to 110,000 troops from its current target of 490,000; and losing possibly two of ten aircraft-carriers, as well as bombers and transport aircraft. The alternative, Mr Hagel said, was to cut spending on modernisation.

Cut, but not to the quick

Inevitably, the proposed cuts have stirred up a hornets’ nest. But just how bad are they? In the ten years to 2011, when America was at war, pay and benefits for the army increased by 57% in real terms. The number of support staff, too, grew rapidly. Because Congress will not touch this large and politically sensitive part of the budget, the cuts must be borne elsewhere.

That is a foolish way to run an army. However, even without the sequester, much of the enormous build-up in spending after the attacks of September 11th 2001 should be going into reverse. Moreover, America’s military might will remain unchallenged, even after the cuts. Just after Mr Hagel set out his ideas, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress about the Pentagon’s revised plans for potential wars around the world. Large invasions may be out, but it can draw on quick-reaction forces and stealth air power and ships. And not only does it outspend most of the rest of the world combined on conventional defence (see chart 3), it also has a formidable nuclear arsenal and the wherewithal for cyber-warfare.

The real question is not whether the country can go to war if it has to, but whether it fights the right sort of war when it chooses to. Modern America has shown an unrivalled appetite for battle. During more than half the years since the end of the cold war it has been in combat. That is not just because of the war in Iraq, which lasted from 2003 to 2011, and that in Afghanistan, which began two years earlier and is still unfinished. Even before that, between 1989 and 2001 the United States intervened abroad on average once every 16 months—more frequently than in any period in its history.

Few are happy about this, especially America’s senior officers. “It’s too easy to use force,” says Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It’s almost the first choice.” General Brent Scowcroft, national-security adviser to Gerald Ford and the elder George Bush, agrees. One reason why politicians have turned to the armed forces, he argues, is that war looks like a shortcut to success. Trying to change people’s minds and influence them in other ways is long and slow. “The fallacy is that often the use of force changes the circumstances of the question. By the time you have finished, the question is different and we frequently find ourselves in an unanticipated situation.”

That was particularly true of Afghanistan and Iraq. The consensus now is that the first war has been unhappy and the second was a mistake. The Iraqi campaign (which The Economist also supported, to the irritation of many of its readers) especially provokes the experts. A “fiasco” and a “catastrophe”, they say; “a 15-year detour” that “sullied America’s moral leadership”. America needs to look squarely at why it found these two wars so hard to help it decide which wars to take on in future.

The basic armoured set-piece on a defined battlefield in which one side wins and the other loses now rarely happens in real life. The past few decades have seen no absolute defeat in the style of Berlin in 1945. Even the most successful recent campaign, the first Gulf war of 1990, left Saddam Hussein in power and at liberty to go on murdering his own people. America went to war for a second time in Iraq in 2003 thinking that the fight was a big armoured assault, only to discover that it had stumbled into a seemingly endless insurgency like the one already under way in Afghanistan. Both were a bit like the Vietnam war, but the army had been so keen to forget Indochina that it had to learn the art of counter-insurgency all over again. What did it discover?

First, that war is even more political than it used to be. Emile Simpson, who was an infantry officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles and served three tours in Afghanistan, argues that modern war is not defined against the enemy alone. Far beyond the battlefields of Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan are other audiences, including the Afghan people, the Muslim world, NATO, China and voters back home. The idea of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan has become ever less relevant. To the politicians in charge and to the overall national interest, the other audiences have counted just as much, if not more.

When groups far from the fighting matter, the foundations of warfare shift all the time. Military strategy needs to evolve to take account of all those other audiences. A drone strike like the recent one that killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban might help defeat the insurgents but undermine the coalition among other groups. Just as you do not win an election by destroying the other party, so you do not win such a war by destroying the enemy. You have to destroy the enemy’s legitimacy.

When the battlefield is diffuse, you get cross-cutting franchises rather than two opposing sides. In Afghanistan the foreign forces were co-opted into tribal and ethnic conflicts that had existed long before they arrived. The allocation of resources was designed to keep the base of supporters as well as win over new ones. It was not about conquering territory and moving forward. America and its allies were dragged into battles that had no clean military solution. Winning the trial of strength could not win over the people: the idea was not destruction but persuasion. If they had sought to destroy the insurgents with raw power, audiences away from the battle would have objected.

The second lesson America’s armed forces learned is that counter-insurgency, or COIN, is drawn out and hard to pull off. One study looking at the past few decades found that only a quarter of COIN campaigns have succeeded—though this may be partly because fights against insurgencies often start as if they were traditional wars. The campaigns tend to last at least 14 years, which means they have to be sustained during at least four American presidential terms.

Richard Betts, of New York’s Columbia University, notes that this is all the more demanding because COIN requires a lot of manpower. Insurgents are prepared to bear heavy casualties. Ho Chi Minh told the French in 1946 that “you will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.” That was more or less what happened.

The force ratio that is often suggested is 20 soldiers for every 1,000 citizens, which works out at about 650,000 troops for Iraq and 600,000 for Afghanistan. The implication is that an insurgency has to be either in a small country or be restricted to a region in a large one. The danger, says Mr Betts, is that the force you send in is too weak to pacify the territory or too big and clumsy to win over the local population.

We’re the US Army and we’re here to help

Humanitarian operations pose an extra problem. Military interventions in small countries, as in Sierra Leone in 2000, have often been successful; in larger ones, such as Sudan, less so. Humanitarian forces seek to be impartial and tend to be small, because the war is voluntary and domestic political support may not last. Mr Betts points out that this combination often only prolongs the fighting. When you are imposing peace, you need either to take sides and send in a small force that can tip the balance and bring the fighting to an end; or remain neutral and send in a large force which can keep the warring sides apart but will probably be stuck in the country for years.

The view from the ground
Many think that in future America can simply avoid such entanglements. Instead, they say, it can restrict itself to big state-on-state “wars of necessity”. American forces are world leaders in this kind of fighting. Any other business can be mopped up by the redoubtable special-operations forces, such as the Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden.

But this is an oversimplification. At the margin, “of necessity” tends to mean nothing more than “justifiable”. Whether the country needs to go to war is always unclear before the fighting starts. Many Americans thought that even Hitler’s Germany should not be attacked—until Japan bombed the American fleet in Hawaii.

Besides, wars of choice might sometimes be worth fighting. Imagine, for instance, engaging a band of jihadists who were repeatedly attacking American interests in a lawless land; or perhaps dealing with a country bent on nuclear proliferation. And what should America do about a nation devastated by genocide, as the Armenians were a century ago?

Even in a war of necessity America often cannot force an enemy to fight on its terms. Conrad Crane, a military historian and author of the COIN manual for Iraq, has observed that “there are two types of warfare, asymmetric and stupid.” The enemy might refuse to fight a stupid war.

Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official, thinks that the army should therefore continue to train its soldiers for COIN among other missions even though, after more than a decade spent fighting insurgents, it has had enough. As today’s troops retire, she says, COIN techniques risk being forgotten. Her fear is well-founded. The Pentagon is preoccupied not by doctrine or the enemy abroad but by budgets and the enemy in Washington.

Limited wars tend to be long and hard, so America needs a clear sense of what it is trying to achieve before the first shot is fired. As Admiral Mullen puts it, “I am tired of interventionists picking up a stick without a strategy, without knowing the political and diplomatic outcome.” Although such wars cannot be avoided altogether, in future America should aim to fight them less often and more wisely.

Adm (ret'd) Mullin, again:  “It’s too easy to use force ... It’s almost the first choice.” And that's a real problem: Clausewitz may have said that war is politics by other means but war, in the 21st century is far more political that Clausewitz ever imagined ... but it, fighting a war, is still a job best left to military professionals just as grand strategy is a complex job best left to a tiny handful of experts, few of whom wear uniforms.

The Chinese do not plan to go to war against America. They do plan to supplant America, sometime late in the 21st or early in the 22nd century, as the most important power on earth, but their plan, and I believe they have one, almost certainly discounts war as a viable course of action. Our (the US led West's) plans for surviving the 21st century and prospering in the 22nd ought to be based on a grand strategy that accepts war as a possible course of action but as one which is not good and is a last resort. Our most powerful weapons are social, intellectual, cultural and economic ... not military.


Edit: typo

 

[jpjohnsn]

Clausewitz may have said that war is politics by other means

Actually, he didn't.  He said

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.

The line about politics came well known because of an earlier mistranslation of his work.

 

[Edward Campbell]

More, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The Economist on the topic of American primacy and the price America has to pay for it:

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21590098-being-charge-hard-work-it-has-its-perks-if-i-ruled-world?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ifiruledtheworld

Special report: America's foreign policy

American Primacy
If I ruled the world
Being in charge is hard work, but it has its perks

Nov 23rd 2013

TO BE CALLED an isolationist these days is a bit like being called a climate-change denier or a free-market fundamentalist. In the eyes of right-thinking people, you have more or less lost the argument before you start. However, now that the cold war is over, Americans would be entirely sensible to ask themselves whether taking on the job of being the biggest power in an ungrateful world is worth the effort. Why should they pay to protect shipping in the Strait of Malacca or punish the dictator of some far-off country when they have their own medical bills and the federal deficit to worry about?

To answer that, you need to look at the rules-based system the victors created after the second world war. It still benefits Americans today in lots of ways. It also benefits many other people, whether they like America or loathe it.

Start with power itself. Walter Russell Mead, a writer and academic, defines four sorts. The sharp power of military force serves as a foundation; the sticky power of economic vitality rewards others for joining the system and makes it expensive for them to pull out; and the sweet power of values attracts and inspires them. The fourth kind, drawing on the work of Joseph Nye, a political scientist, is hegemonic power, which is sometimes called primacy.

Primacy is to geopolitics what a full card is to a game of bingo. As a prize for scoring in all the other sorts of power, a country may get the chance to set the agenda. Primacy makes a state attractive. Other states want to win its favour and to benefit from its goodwill. Their support is a form of consent which gives the system legitimacy. On the global stage, the hegemonic country becomes what Colonel Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson’s friend and adviser, called “the gyroscope of world order”.

America has advantages in the primacy game. First is geography. Being self-contained makes America secure, whereas all other great powers have had to defend themselves against their neighbours. Even Britain at the height of empire in the 19th century was repeatedly distracted by the need to stop any one country dominating continental Europe. By contrast, America has friends to the north and south and fish to the east and west. Europeans warily eyeing nearby Russia, or Asians fearful of China, can ask Americans for help, safe in the knowledge that they have a home to go back to on the other side of the world.

Second is history. America built today’s system out of the rubble of the second world war. Because the other powers were exhausted and the United States was still strong, it could start with a clean sheet. The lesson from the disastrous armistice of 1918 for Roosevelt and, after him, Truman was that the defeated countries had to be turned into democracies and bound into the peace, not shut out. They accomplished this, outside the communist bloc, through a system of open trade, alliances and collective security in which everyone stood to thrive, with America as its guarantor.

America also benefits from its distinctive political ideology and institutions. Founded on Enlightenment ideals rather than a conqueror’s battle lines or a monarch’s bloodlines, they distributed power among the states and the branches of the federal government. Along with a dissident religious tradition, this has meant that in peacetime the United States is in an almost constant state of turmoil, which is evident even when it ventures abroad. “Americans, in foreign policy, are torn,” writes Robert Kagan, an American historian. “Reluctant, then aggressive; asleep at the switch, then quick on the trigger; indifferent, then obsessed, then indifferent again. They are a revolutionary power, but think they are a status-quo power.”

However disconcerting it is to be on the receiving end, this attitude means that America has neither the desire nor the ability to conquer and administer other people’s countries. The hegemon’s necessarily modest ambitions help the system command widespread consent abroad. Reflecting political traditions at home, America has created an embryonic separation of powers for the world at large as well. Instead of running everything from Washington, it set up institutions such as the UN, the WTO and the IMF to spread power.

This international machinery is a forum for its members, not a world government. It is highly imperfect—too steeped in Western ideals for some, too easily ignored for others (including Saudi Arabia, which in a snub to the United States has just turned down a seat on the UN Security Council), and an infringement of sovereignty for a third group (including many Americans, who resent the UN’s constraints, and many Israelis, who often see their country picked on). But it binds the system together, because it gives other states a voice and offers a ready-made mechanism for collaboration when agreement is possible.

Domestic division seems to imperil good order and common sense while you are living through it. That is one reason why American primacy so often appears to be in dangerous decline. None other than Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national-security chief and secretary of state, reportedly told a colleague in the 1970s that the United States had “passed its historic high point, like so many earlier civilisations”.

In fact the system has worked remarkably well. The overwhelming fear in Europe after the second world war was of a third attempt at conquest by a belligerent Germany. Yet America was able to keep the peace by reassuring other Europeans about the German threat as well as protecting them from Soviet aggression. Germany and Japan eventually regained great-power status. But this time they rose peacefully within the system.

What’s in it for America

America, too, has enjoyed enduring benefits from primacy. It was spared yet another great-power war in either Europe or, after Korea in 1950-53, in Asia. Germany and Japan became markets for the United States and an important part of the defence against communism. Barring the odd scare about foreign ownership of sensitive assets, Germany’s and Japan’s growing wealth has only served to strengthen America’s position in the world.

Indeed, the economic and philosophical liberalism that underpins America’s beliefs has become so familiar that, to many in the West, it hardly seems like an ideology at all. After the Soviet collapse a sort of liberal determinism took hold. The idea was that capitalism raised living standards, which paid for education, leading to gains in productivity and, eventually, popular demand for democracy. The promise of this “democratic convergence” was that the international arena would tend to bring peace and prosperity of its own accord. As the world headed towards the perpetual peace of republics imagined by Immanuel Kant, an Enlightenment philosopher, the hegemon could look forward to retirement.

Yet if you examine the spread of democracy, as Mr Kagan has done, a different picture emerges. Democracy flourished under British hegemony and then retreated as fascism took root (see chart 1)—not because of invasion but because of imitation in places such as Latin America. In 1941 the world contained only a dozen democracies. As Samuel Huntington, a political scientist, has explained, the system then spread in waves, partly because America used its influence to help democracy take root in countries like Taiwan and Poland, and to protect young democracies in countries like Bolivia, South Korea and the Philippines. According to Mr Kagan, the fallacy is to think that the liberal order rests on the triumph of its ideals. “International order is not an evolution,” he writes, “it is an imposition.”

The corollary is that, without the continuing application of American power, the system would begin to fray. If America were to become weaker or to withdraw, its values would erode along with its power. In a recent book Mr Brzezinski set out some of the risks. Regional powers would vie for pre-eminence and assert their historic claims. States such as Georgia, Taiwan and Ukraine, which all live in the shadow of a much bigger neighbour, would be especially vulnerable. Nuclear-threshold powers like Japan and South Korea that today are content to rely on American nuclear protection may proliferate for fear that, in a crisis, its ally would not credibly threaten to push the button. As emerging powers start to feel that institutions such as the UN Security Council no longer reflect the balance of power, they could begin to reject them.

The implications are alarming. Autocratic states like China and Russia would not want to see strongmen pushed aside. Coups would be more likely to be defined as internal matters. Territorial disputes in places like the South China Sea, which today America insists must be dealt with diplomatically, may come to be resolved by force. If the Indian and Chinese navies thought that America could no longer guarantee to keep the sea lanes open, they would take the job on themselves, eventually leading to military competition between two nuclear states.

Americans have many reasons to feel that primacy benefits them. Being able to set the agenda and shape coalitions is an exorbitant privilege. So is being able to prosper in a system that broadly works according to your own world view. However, world leadership takes constant maintenance. “Democracy and open markets have spread so widely in part because they have been defended by US aircraft-carriers,” notes Charles Kupchan, an American academic. This is especially true when the balance of power is shifting, as it is today. A number of emerging powers are looking at a system made in Washington to see what is in it for them. Ahead of the pack is China.

For "the rest," which includes those countries, like Canada, in the US led West, the alternatives to American primacy are few and far between and, I suggest, unpleasant.

 

[a_majoor]

A long article by WRM on "The American Interest" which explains what *we* in the American led west are up against. Knowing the opposition is one thing, do *we* have the will to take effective action and the resources to stay in the game for the long term? Recent history suggests willpower is very short, and the long term financial picture is also not encouraging:

Part 1

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/12/02/2013-the-end-of-history-ends/

2013: The End of History Ends
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Sometime in 2013, we reached a new stage in world history. A coalition of great powers has long sought to overturn the post Cold War Eurasian settlement that the United States and its allies imposed after 1990; in the second half of 2013 that coalition began to gain ground. The revisionist coalition hasn’t achieved its objectives, and the Eurasian status is still quo, but from this point on we will have to speak of that situation as contested, and American policymakers will increasingly have to respond to a challenge that, until recently, most chose to ignore.

Call the challengers the Central Powers; they hate and fear one another as much as they loathe the current geopolitical order, but they are joined at the hip by the belief that the order favored by the United States and its chief allies is more than an inconvenience. The big three challengers – Russia, China and Iran — all hate, fear and resent the current state of Eurasia. The balance of power it enshrines thwarts their ambitions; the norms and values it promotes pose deadly threats to their current regimes. Until recently there wasn’t much they could do but resent the world order; now, increasingly, they think they have found a way to challenge and ultimately to change the way global politics work.

This is not, yet, a pre-war situation. The Central Powers know that they can’t challenge the United States, the EU, Japan and the various affiliates and associates of what we might call the Maritime Association head on. The military and economic facts on the ground would make such a challenge suicidal. But if they can’t challenge the world system head on, they can chip away at its weak spots and, where the maritime powers leave a door unlatched or a window open, they can make a quick move. They can use our own strategic shortsightedness against us, they can weaken the adhesion of our core alliances, and they can use the mechanisms of the international system (above all, the United Nations Security Council where Russia and China both wield the veto) to throw bananas in our path.

Lacking the strength for a head on confrontation, they are opportunistic feeders. They look for special circumstances where the inattention, poor judgment or domestic political constraints of the status quo powers offer opportunities. Russia’s strike against Georgia was one such move; both Russia and Iran have skillfully exploited the divisions among the Americans and their allies over the horror in Syria.

Think of the Central Powers as an ‘axis of weevils’. At this stage they are looking to hollow out the imposing edifice of American and maritime power rather than knock it over. This is not the most formidable alliance the United States has ever faced. Not everything the Central Powers want is bad; like all revisionist powers, they have legitimate grievances against the status quo. They don’t always agree, and in the long run their differences with one another are profound. But for now, they have not only agreed that they have a common interest in weakening the United States in Eurasia and disrupting its alliances; increasingly, with the United States government still largely blind to the challenge, they are pushing ahead.

A Miraculous Fall

A happy Thanksgiving week capped off a successful fall for the Axis of Weevils. As President Obama pardoned a turkey in the Rose Garden and millions of other gobblers headed for the ovens, the three big Eurasian powers seeking to gnaw away at the post-Cold War order across the world’s greatest landmass are celebrating big wins.

Iran should be giddy with joy; pro-administration commentary from the White House and its media allies has focused on the nuclear technicalities to paint the deal as a success, but there is no disguising the immense diplomatic gains that Tehran made. Washington hasn’t just loosened sanctions as part of a temporary negotiation; it is opening the door to a broader relationship with Iran at a time when Iran and its Shia proxies are making unprecedented gains across the Middle East. Just as President Obama essentially allowed President Assad of Syria to trade a promise to get rid of his chemical weapons for what amounts to a de facto end to US efforts to push his blood stained regime out of power, so Iran believes it can trade a promise to end its nuclear program for American acquiescence to its domination of the Fertile Crescent and, potentially, the Gulf. This would be an epochal shift in the global balance of power and the consequences — in strained alliances and diminished US influence and prestige — are already being felt.

After the nuclear deal came more joy for Tehran; as the New York Times reports, morale is flagging and unity is fraying among the Syrian opposition even as Butcher Assad’s ground forces continue to grind out more gains. Mussolini and Hitler used to have days like this as Franco’s forces slowly and painfully crushed the Spanish Republic — while a divided west stood by, wringing its hands at the slaughter and dithering over the unsavory nature of the Republican coalition. As the sanctions ease, there will be more money to support Assad and Hezbollah; at a critical moment the United States is giving Iran access to more resources for war. Meanwhile, far from showing restraint, Iran continues to push the envelope of what was agreed in the nuclear talks, as officials announce ambitious plans for lots more nuclear reactors, including more heavy water reactors like the one at Arak. In effect, the United States has tilted toward Iran in the Sunni-Shi’a war; both friends and foes are scratching their heads.

President Putin, meanwhile, is giving hearty thanks for one of Russia’s biggest successes since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Kremlin is high-fiving its stunning, come-from-behind victory as Ukraine said a polite “No thank you” to the European Union’s offer of an economic association agreement. While the final shape of Russia’s neighborhood remains to be seen, and protests have erupted against the government’s decision in Kiev, an EU-Ukraine agreement would have gutted Putin’s international strategy and hit his standing at home. Flabby and uncertain European diplomacy (as we wrote earlier, the EU brought a baguette to a knife fight in the Ukrainian dispute) enabled a weak Russia to grab the gold.

Putin may not be able to hold onto his prize, but for now he can justly boast of having outwitted and bested the EU on one of the biggest issues of the day.

It’s been tougher going in the Far East; China’s declaration of a special air defense zone over the East China Sea met with mockery and disdain from the neighbors until Washington stepped in with a face saving concession. After US bombers blew through the zone, Japan and South Korea followed up with flights of their own. Japanese civilian air carriers announced plans to comply with China’s demand, but after the display of resolution from Tokyo and Washington, they stiffened their spines and announced that they would not change their flight procedures to suit China’s new zone.

They should have waited a bit longer; the US government has asked American airlines to comply with the new China zone. At one level, this is straightforward common sense; the military will continue to defy Chinese restrictions, but civilian flights out of an abundance of caution will bend over backwards to keep themselves (and their passengers) out of trouble. But China declared this zone in violation of the usual procedures and it is highly unlikely that Beijing would harass civilian aircraft bringing customers and investors to its hungry economy. In context, Beijing is likely to see Washington’s advice to US airlines as less of an olive branch than a white flag — a sign that Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’ is more about hot air than real political will.

China believes that time is on its side in the region, and that the Obama administration and the American people generally don’t have the persistence to stand up against a long, slow increase in diplomatic and military pressure in East Asia. Like Russia and Iran, China believes that Washington’s first goal in many confrontations is to find a face saving way to retreat; expect more initiatives from Beijing as it takes advantage of what increasingly is seen globally as a period of drift and vulnerability in American foreign policy. The Chinese are not only putting more military aircraft into their East China Sea air defense zone; they are reportedly planning to proclaim new air defense zones over other hotspots.

As the Indian strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney points out, China seems to be adopting what PLA General Zhang Zhaozhong called a “cabbage strategy:”

assert a territorial claim and gradually surround the area with multiple layers of security, thus denying access to a rival. The strategy relies on a steady progression of steps to outwit opponents and create new facts on the ground.

Chellaney suggests that China’s proclamation of the air defense zone is part of a region-wide pattern that expands China’s reach without triggering a strong US response:

To be sure, China is careful to avoid any dramatic action that could become a casus belli by itself. Indeed, it has repeatedly shown a knack for disaggregating its strategy into multiple parts and then pursuing each element separately in such a manner as to allow the different pieces to fall into place with minimal resistance.

This shrewdness not only keeps opponents off balance; it also undercuts the relevance of US security assurances to allies and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships in Asia. In fact, by camouflaging offense as defense, China casts the burden of starting a war on an opponent, while it seeks to lay the foundation – brick by brick – of a hegemonic Middle Kingdom. Chinese leaders’ stated desire to resolve territorial disputes peacefully simply means achieving a position strong enough to get their way without having to fire a shot.

If this is the game, Washington’s decision to advise civilian aircraft to observe the new zone has played right into Beijing’s strategy and will strengthen perceptions in Beijing and elsewhere that the American position in Asia is already on the wane.