March 15, 2010
Iraq Briefing - 10 March 2010 - The Drawdown of US Forces Continues
Major General Terry Wolff, commander of the U.S. Forces Division Central (USD-C), spoke via satellite from Iraq with reporters at the Pentagon last Wednesday, providing an update on operations.
Maj. Gen Wolff reports to Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., Deputy Commanding General for Operations. Jacoby reports to General Odierno, Commanding GeneralUnited States Forces - Iraq. Odierno reports to Gen. Petraeus, commanding general of CENTCOM. Petreaus reports to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
USD-C is headquartered by the 1st Armored Division, operating in the in the cities of Ramadi, Fallujah and Baghdad.
This and other videos can be seen at DODvClips. The Pentagon Channel also has videos and news stories, so visit it as well.
The transcript is at DefenseLink.
Several subjects were discussed in this briefing, the most important of which were:
1) The performance of Iraqi forces in the March 7 parliamentary elections
2) The continuing drawdown of U.S. forces
3) Whether U.S. forces were engaged in combat, or what exactly they do these days
4) A recent minor attack on a U.S. convoy.
All are important, but we'll concentrate on the drawdown of U.S. forces as that's what most on people's minds.
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March 13, 2010
The Manhattan Declaration: A Christian Call to Arms
A Facebook post the other day on The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience by a friend of mine reminded me that I'd wanted to blog about it for several months but just never got around to it.
An explanation, from the website:
Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family. It was in this tradition that a group of prominent Christian clergy, ministry leaders, and scholars released the Manhattan Declaration on November 20, 2009 at a press conference in Washington, DC. The 4,700-word declaration speaks in defense of the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty. It issues a clarion call to Christians to adhere firmly to their convictions in these three areas.
It will be easy for some to dismiss this out of hand as a propaganda piece of the far right, aimed at denying the civil liberties of gays, atheists, agnostics, and others. To those who would, bear with me for awhile.
The progressive view of history is that we are always moving forward, or at least should be, and are always improving our lot. All or most programs enacted in the past hundred and fifty years have improved society and everything is thus getting better. Jeff Bergner, writing in The Weekly Standard, calls this "The Narrative:"
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March 11, 2010
Krauthammer Nails it on Counterinsurgency
Are We Finally Beginning to Understand How to Win?
Charles Krauthammer last night on Fox News as one of the "all star" commentators:
...I think it fits with the interesting strategy that McChrystal has because the objective is not the killing of the Taliban. The objective is to gain the confidence of the civilians.If you announce in advance you will do Kandahar, the capital [of the Taliban], the prize here, you hope that the small bands of the enemy roaming around will think twice about hanging around and facing the U.S. Marines, because they will lose.
And you are doing is appealing to the less fanatical and less ideological and the less suicidal enemy who will sneak around and join the population and give up the fight and become civilians. And we aren't against that.
The idea is once they get integrated in society, that's OK. You don't want a victory where you have to surrender on the battleship Missouri. What you want is to win the confidence of the population.
I don't know whether to be happy or sad when I read this. I didn't see the video, but Krauthammer seems to think this is some sort of a unique strategy. If so, I'm disappointed, because protecting the population as opposed to simply hunting and killing insurgents was the entire strategic basis of the surge in Iraq. I guess that Charles hasn't been reading The Redhunter.
I've gone over this a kazillion times on Redhunter, but once more can't hurt. Maybe there's a new reader who cares about this stuff.
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Book Review - Whose Ethics? Whose Morals?
I listen to a lot of Christian radio, mostly music during the day and talk at night. Of course, I also listen to Laura, Rush, Dennis Miller, and others too. But I can't go a whole day without some time with God, and radio is part of His ministry.
Like any other genre, some Christian talk radio is good and some is bad. Spare me the fire and brimstone. Bring on insightful, intellectual, and intelligent commentary. Of the latter, Christian Research Institute Chairman Hank Hanegraaff is one of the best. I've listened to him long enough to know that he didn't earn the moniker "the bible answer man" by accident. Check your local radio listings for availability.
Hanegraaff has published a number of works, and one day I'll buy more of them. My time for reading being somewhat small, I decided to start with one of his smaller ones, Whose Ethics? Whose Morals? The Best of the Christian Research Journal. At 95 pages, it's not a long read.
The book is a collection of short essays; one by Hanegraaff, and 5 by other authors. My conclusion; there are a few good sections, but in general it was a letdown. Partially this is just me, because any reader of this blog knows that while I am pro-life, I don't spend much time on the subject. Ditto with other hot-button social issues such as cloning and stem cell research. If the details of these subjects interest you, you'll probably find the book more useful than I did.
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March 9, 2010
Afghanistan Briefing - 04 March 2010 - A Taliban Who Trusts Americans
This briefing is by Brigadier General Lawrence D. Nicholson. General Nicholson is the commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Last Thursday he spoke via satellite from Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan with reporters at the Pentagon.
This and other videos can be seen at DODvClips. The Pentagon Channel also has videos and news stories, so visit it as well.
The transcript is at DefenseLink.
First, an excerpt from Gen Nicholson's opening statement, then on with the Q & A from the assembled journalists:
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March 3, 2010
The Decline of American Military Hegemony
David Wood talks about something that I've been worried about for some time:
China, Iran Creating 'No-Go' Zones to Thwart U.S. Military Power
by David Woods
Politics Daily
The United States, Pentagon strategists say, is quickly losing its ability to barge in without permission. Potential target countries and even some lukewarm allies are figuring out ingenious ways to blunt American power without trying to meet it head-on, using a combination of high-tech and low-tech jujitsu....
At the same time, U.S. naval and air forces have been shrinking under the weight of ever more expensive hardware. It's no longer the case that the United States can overwhelm clever defenses with sheer numbers.
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up the problem this month, countries in places where the United States has strategic interests -- including the Persian Gulf and the Pacific -- are building "sophisticated, new technologies to deny our forces access to the global commons of sea, air, space and cyberspace.''
Those innocuous words spell trouble. While the U.S. military and strategy community is focused on Afghanistan and the fight in Marja, others - Iran and China, to name two - are chipping away at America's access to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf and the increasingly critical extraterrestrial realms.
"This era of U.S. military dominance is waning at an increasing and alarming rate,'' Andrew Krepinevich, a West Point-educated officer and former senior Pentagon strategist, writes in a new report. "With the spread of advanced military technologies and their exploitation by other militaries, especially China's People's Liberation Army and to a far lesser extent Iran's military and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the U.S. military's ability to preserve military access to two key areas of vital interest, the western Pacific and the Persian Gulf, is being increasingly challenged.''
There seems to be a myth out there that because the U.S. is the U.S. we will automatically win any high-tech war. I call it the "Top Gun Syndrome," and while Hollywood is maybe partially to blame they're just rehashing what they saw in the Gulf War.
Due to other pressures I only have time for the briefest of comments. I also don't have time to set up a bunch of links, and so to a large extent will be going off of my general knowledge of the subject and my previous posts. Lets start with this:
The Air War Over Vietnam
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March 2, 2010
Obama and the Arrogance of the Liberal Elites
I'm busy this week with projects, and so have no time to post much original writing. This piece though sums up much that is wrong with the progressive movement
An FDR lesson Obama missed
by Wesley Pruden
The Washington Times
Barack Obama is trying to be the new FDR before the concrete settles around his image as the new Jimmy Carter. History will ultimately decide, but last week's celebrated health care summit made him look more like Mr. Jimmy than FDR.
The president was full of self-righteous talk, mostly about himself, and he twice felt it necessary to remind everyone that he's the president, recalling Richard Nixon's bizarre reassurance that he was not a crook. Some things are self-evident, and if they're not, such things are usually not true. We can stipulate that, like it or not, he's the president.
The Democrats relished the opportunity to portray the Republicans as the wrinkled party of "no," a crabby relic of the 20th century, devoid of anything that anybody could want, and Barack Obama's low-church eloquence would melt skepticism like butter on warm toast. But it didn't happen. Setting out the idea of a plain and simple alternative to Obamacare -- smaller measures to reform, taken step by step -- the Republicans sounded like the party of common sense, purveyors of the kind of kitchen-table solution that would work a lot better than an elaborate welfare-state scheme.
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February 25, 2010
The Hypocrisy of the Liberal Call for "Unity"
So we read that Hillary Clinton tells us that we are weaker because we have political fights between Republicans and Democrats:
Clinton: Political fights hurt U.S. image: Wants world to see 'unity and strength'
The Washington Times
By Nicholas KralevPresident Obama's diminished political power as a result of fights between the White House and Congress has damaged both his and the country's image abroad, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday.
Even as she thanked Congress for its bipartisan support for many of the Obama administration's foreign policy goals, Mrs. Clinton said during two Senate committee hearings that recent bickering on domestic issues concerns her and that she hopes "we can figure out a better way to address it."
We hear this line often from Democrats these days. It's a lot of nonsense, and here's why:
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February 23, 2010
The "most open and transparent administration in history" sets record for avoiding press conferences
Get this:
Obama tops Bush at ducking reporters
The Washington Times
February 22, 2010
by Joseph CurlPresident Obama, who pledged to establish the most open and transparent administration in history, on Monday surpasses his predecessor's record for avoiding a full-fledged question-and-answer session with White House reporters in a formal press conference.
President George W. Bush's longest stretch between prime-time, nationally televised press conferences was 214 days, from April 4 to Nov. 4, 2004. Mr. Obama tops that record on Monday, going 215 days - stretching back to July 22, according to records kept by CBS Radio's veteran reporter Mark Knoller.
The president has seemingly shunned formal, prime-time sessions since his last disastrous presser, when he said police in Cambridge, Mass., "acted stupidly" by arresting a Harvard professor who broke into a home that turned out to be his own. The off-the-cuff comment took over the news cycle for a week, overshadowing his push for health care reform, and culminated in a White House "Beer Summit," where the president hosted white police officer James Crowley and the black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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February 22, 2010
Iraq Briefing - 16 February 2010 - A "significant improvement of the day-to-day lives of Iraqis"
Yes I know, you're tempted to skip over this post because Iraq is so... yesterday. Afghanistan is understandably all the rage, and blog posts that are more topical and angry are the ones that generate all the comments.
Does that mean the public has largely conceded that we've won? In part, I think.
There have not been any briefings lately on The Pentagon Channel or DODvClips, and I'm not entirely sure why. Obviously there is not as much fighting in Iraq as there was a year ago, but I wonder if a decision was taken at a higher level to not do as many as they used to. This is pure speculation, of course.
Fortunately our commander in Iraq, General Raymond Odierno, accepted Dr. Kimberly Kagan's invitation to discuss the future of Iraq at a forum she held on February 16.
The entire interview and Q & A is over an hour, and videos and the complete transcript can be found at the Institute for the Study of War website here.
General Odierno was the #2 man in Iraq during the "surge" of 2007-8, and earned a we'll deserved reputation as the "Patton of Counterinsurgency". The analogy is this; Odierno was to Petraeus what Patton was to Eisenhower. Patton executed Ike's strategy, ditto for Odierno.
Kimberly Kagan's husband, Frederick Kagan, has been accurately described as "the intellectual author of the surge." It was him and retired General Jack Keane (who introduces them in the first video) who first convinced President Bush to change course. Kimberly is founder and President of the Institute for the Study of War.
Between the two Kagans they are probably the two smartest military theorists on the planet. Those who follow this blog know that I have quoted both of them often.
Here is the first part of the interview, with the others below the fold:
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