In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta left little doubt as to whether the People’s Republic of China was assisting North Korea with their ballistic missile program.  From the Reuters article:

“I’m sure there’s been some help coming from China. I don’t know, you know, the exact extent of that,” Panetta told members of the House Armed Services Committee when asked whether China had been supporting North Korea’s missile program through “trade and technology exchanges.”

While understandably unable to delve into details due to “sensitivity”, Secretary Panetta gave voice to the deep suspicions many have had since the beginning of China’s rise twenty years ago.   It should be clear for all to see that China gains advantage by having a belligerent and nuclear-capable North Korea as a major thorn in the side of the United States in precisely the region that is the future focus of US Defense strategy, the Western Pacific.

The People’s Republic of China has consistently thwarted the efforts of the US and her allies to bring the DPRK under control  China refused to condemn North Korea for the sinking of the ROK frigate Cheonan, which killed 46 ROK sailors.  Nor did China offer any meaningful criticism for the shelling of Yeongpyong Island, which resulted in the deaths of two ROK Marines, other than an admonition not to “escalate”.  When taken with the Chinese watering-down of UNSC sanctions against North Korea, continued military assistance, collaboration with DPRK in cyber attack efforts, ambivalence toward DPRK weapons and technology proliferation into the Middle East, and a blind eye to provocative border and SOF incursions into South Korea, these actions are indicators of China’s tacit approval of North Korea’s actions and posture.

There have been many who have sounded the warning klaxon.   The issue has been addressed here, and the December 2011 Proceedings “Now Hear This” article by Defense analyst Joseph Bosco.

While China’s role in keeping the North Korean regime in power—and in the WMD business—is indisputable, analysts have offered unconvincing explanations of Chinese motives. U.S. experts have assured us that China shares our nuclear concerns but fears instability on the Korean peninsula. They accept China’s argument that even threatening to cut economic aid would collapse Kim Jong Il’s regime and trigger a refugee flow into China. But it has been clear for 60 years that the sole cause of instability between the Koreas has been Pyongyang’s own bizarre and dangerous behavior, despite substantial aid and concessions from accommodating South Korean governments. Yet China stands by its ally.

Indeed.  Despite the consistent platitudes from Chinese diplomats and military officials of their willingness to be of assistance in “managing” North Korea, the reality is that China has very successfully played power politics in developing and maintaining North Korea’s military capabilities and belligerent posture.   Chinese assistance to North Korea in developing a ballistic missile capability to carry a nuclear warhead well beyond the Korean peninsula is not a shocking aberration, but another in a long and consistent series of actions that cannot point reasonably to any other conclusion.  North Korea will try again with the missile launch.  And with Chinese assistance, they will eventually succeed.

The assertions to the contrary grow equally foolish-sounding, and detached from reality.  One, in a rebuttal to the Bosco article, was that “The prospect of a better outcome lies not in blaming China but in working imaginatively with China and others to transform North Korea under new leadership”.    Don’t you believe it.  China has proven for decades they are more than willing to live with their recalcitrant southern neighbors, and the only “transformation” that Chinese leadership is interested in is making North Korea a more potent threat to the United States and its Western Pacific allies.

As has been said before, the time has long since come to recognize at the highest military and civilian levels of leadership in the United States that China is very far from being a benevolent ally, and even farther from sharing any kind of common interests or vision of either Asia and the Pacific Rim, or any other geographic region where they perceive their interests to lie.  And this includes China’s subsidizing of the brutal, aggressive, repressive regime in North Korea.

***********************************************

As if on cue, DPRK ratchets up the rhetoric.    And this telling summation from MSNBC:

In Beijing, North Korea’s biggest ally, China’s top foreign policy official met Sunday with a North Korean delegation and expressed confidence in the country’s new young leader, Kim Jong Un.

**********************************************

Seems the nuclear DPRK is no longer a hypothetical, if US estimates are correct.   Which magnifies every last occurrence of Red China’s assistance to the Hermit Kingdom.

While below some comments express abhorrence of the spectre of a nuclear exchange, it is highly useful to remember that the People’s Republic of China and by proxy, her ally North Korea, do not necessarily share that view.    I would caution the use of the term “well-reasoned” when framing the Korean peninsula in terms of American values and viewpoints.  Which brings the argument back to that of being strong and capable enough with our conventional and nuclear arsenal to deter both countries from precisely the bellicosity that one has repeatedly threatened and the other has excused and minimized.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Air Force, Army, Books, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Homeland Security, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy, Proceedings, Uncategorized | read comments (33)

CDR Salamander and I venture again into the world of live internet radio Sunday, April 15 at 5pm (1700) U.S. Eastern with our Episode 119 Offshore Balancing the Indian Ocean 04/15 by Midrats on Blog Talk Radio:

What is real, and what is a mirage? Can something be a cost effective strategic option, or a fool’s errand?

As outlined by our guests in their lates work in the periodical, Asian Security: An Ocean Too Far: Offshore Balancing in the Indian Ocean; the United States is beset by war weariness after over a decade of war and a half century plus of global committments. We find ourselves with a stagnant economy, and skyrocketing defense procurement costs. It is seductive to think of retiring from continental Eurasia, but if history calls us back – returning in times of systemic conflict would be problematic – even in the relatively accessible rimlands of Western Europe and East Asia.

In a part of the world with the planet’s largest democracy – offshore balancing is close to impossible in the Indian Ocean.

As it turns out, offshore balancing in the Indian Ocean may be no balancing at all.

From “The complex network of global cargo ship movements” by Pablo Kaluza, et al. (oval added)

Our guest for the full hour to discuss their article will be U.S. Naval War College Associate Professors James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara.

Offshore balancing? What the heck is that? Tune in and find out – and, if you can’t make the live show because you are buried in receipts and other paper as you try to reduce your tax burden before April 17 – well, join us in the “not so live” downloads from here or from the Midrats iTune page.

Posted by Eagle1 in Foreign Policy, Hard Power, Maritime Security, Navy, Soft Power | read comments (0)

The Pentagon, South Korea and Japan are all reporting that the North Korean Unha-3 satellite launch vehicle (SLV) failed shortly after launch at 0739 local time Apr. 13. Flight time was reportedly on the order of only one minute with a claim that , but reports are still spotty. The western media invited to North Korea for the launch appears not to have been invited to the actual event, so the prospect of footage is limited.

As SteelJaw has pointed out, this was a new launch facility on the west coast and a southerly launch for a sun-synchronous polar insertion — a shift from previous launches from an east coast facility. And though Kim Jong-Un, Kim Jong-Il’s son and predecessor, continues to work to consolidate his power in Pyongyang, the preparations for this launch likely pre-date his father’s death.

And while there will be much mockery of the failure, it is also worth remembering that despite the crude nature of the Unha SLV, North Korea stunned the world in 1998 by very nearly succeeding with its first-ever launch, demonstrating staging and successful separation of the first two stages without previous full-scale flight tests. The North is admittedly one of the more entertaining and idiosyncratic places in the world, there is a logic behind their behavior, which goes to the heart of the remarkable way in which the long-isolated pariah state of North Korea has kept itself at the center of international diplomacy and has captured and held on to the attention of the world’s major powers.

North Korea is a long way from being able to put a deliverable nuclear warhead atop such a missile, there have also been intentionally-visible preparations for a third nuclear test — preparations that were intended to convey that the international community can respond to the launch by either continuing to follow through with a February agreement with Pyongyang or by breaking with the agreement and accept the consequence of a third test.

Posted by nhughes in Foreign Policy | read comments (4)

Stick around any job long enough and pretty soon you’ll find a pattern of repetition or cycles will emerge. When on active duty, it was inexorably tied to the CVW turnaround training cycle. This year we are now on the threshold of the 3rd North Korean space launch vehicle (SLV) attempt since 2006 and the 4th overall since 1998 and my third participation in one form or another thereof (for the record, they are batting .000 with an Oh-for-3 record since 1998 – kind of like how the Red Sox and Yankees started the year, eh?). At least this time they had the good grace not to screw with a 4-day holiday weekend. Given this Northeast Asian 21st century meme, I thought we might take a moment and breakdown aspects of the launch and the SLV as it will provide a basis for comparison with the next in the series on the Atlas – our first ICBM and workhorse SLV from almost a half-century ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by SteelJaw in Foreign Policy | read comments (6)
Tags: ICBM, North Korea, SLV, Unha-3

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation look at the strategic move of sending in the Marines to the Northern Territory.

A continuation of a 60 year alliance and a message:

ALAN DUPONT, INT. SECURITY STUDIES, UNSW: It’s not so much the Marines themselves but it’s the symbol – the signal it sends to the region that Australia is – and the United States are working together to meet these common challenges. So I think it’s quite an important shift.

UPDATE: Robert Kaplan has a related analysis at Stratfor America’s Pacific Logic:

Were the United States not now to turn to the Indo-Pacific, it would risk a multipolar military order arising up alongside an already existent multipolar economic and political order. Multipolar military systems are more unstable than unipolar and bipolar ones because there are more points of interactions and thus more opportunities for miscalculations, as each country seeks to readjust the balance of power in its own favor. U.S. military power in the Indo-Pacific is needed not only to manage the peaceful rise of China but also to stabilize a region witnessing the growth of indigenous civil-military post-industrial complexes.

Posted by Eagle1 in Foreign Policy, Hard Power, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Navy | read comments (1)

Let’s get this list going.

As an observation and a nod, not a criticism (of course) of our Vice President Joe Biden –  who observed that, “You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.”

Because this will be a list, compiled into one blog post, whatever you put in the comments (respectfully and to the point of the post) we will incorporate into the post – then delete. Please submit your comments to us here or via blog@usni.org or give us your submissions via Twitter  or Facebook . And when the first 500 hits it, [UPDATE]: WE WILL MAKE A BRACKET COMPETITION.

Give us your best of the best who were audacious – winners or losers – those who dared. We will update the list daily, no repeats – so dig deep when your favorite has already been mentioned.

Listed in order of submission and raw commentary (and without attribution and to protect the innocent):

500. SEAL mission per Vice President Joe Biden: Audacious on the part of our Commander in Chief, President Obama.

499. Japanese attack on Pearl was an Orange/Blue war-gamer exercise 6 or 7 years before 1941.

498. Entebbe, anyone? Or one might even argue that the raid on Bin Laden’s compound would not have been possible without the lessons learned from the even more audacious (if ultimately unsuccessful) plan of Operation Eagle Claw.

497. Lets start early. 1519 Hernan Cortez landed 600 Spaniards and about a dozen horses at Cozumel. He BURNED HIS SHIPS so there was no way to escape, and he and his men had to fight to the death. He led his men to destroy the entire Aztec Empire something that no invader had done in over 6 centuries. In the process he actually convinced the Aztecs that he was THEIR GOD.

496. Henry V at Agincourt – Nope, too early. 

496. (Do-over) ‎”Kedging“- How USS Constitution Sailors evaded 170 guns of HMS Africa, Shannon, Belvidera & Aeolus!

495.

Dare I say George Washington before the Battle of Trenton? Christmas Day 1776.

George Washington Crosses the Delaware in the dark of night to attack the British in Trenton.

For me there is one and only one #1. Without it an army driffs away, an idea dies, a piece of paper signed at the greatest personal risk becomes meaningless. General George Washington’s decision to attack Trenton on the morning after Christmas 1776 with a night march of impossible proportions couples not only audaciousness, but the greatest risk. For me it is the single most important moment without even a close second in American history, and for the idea of freedom as the world knows it today, possibly. My own telling here: http://blog.projectwhitehorse.com/2010/12/christmas-1776-the-crossing/

494, Eben Emael and the raid to free Mussolini

493. CDR “Red” Ramage, USS Parche, Pacific, 1944: as commanding officer of the U.S.S. Parche http://www.homeofheroes.com/moh/citations_1940_wwii/ramage.html

492.  Col Robin Olds, Operation BOLO Mig Sweep, North Vietnam, 1967 http://user.icx.net/~arlisk/bolo.html

491.  Doolittle Raid Doolittle Raid, 1942…(while a japanese radio broadcast stated, almost to the moment of the attack, how Japan would never be attacked, with air raid sirens suddenly going off-a “baghdad bob” moment)…which in turn, caused grave consternation, and thus triggered rash action by the Imperial Japanese Navy, resulting in catastrophic loss at Midway, with which they would lose their offensive initiative for the remainder of the war…despite efforts to regain it at Guadalcanal and others.

490. Admiral David Farragut leads his ships into Mobile Bay, 1864. Approaching the mine field laid by the Confederates the USS Tecumseh (first in the battle line) hit a mine and exploded, shocking the entire fleet. The USS Brooklyn stopped dead in the water, and the Captain asked the Admiral for instructions. Farragut ordered his ship, the Hartford, to steam around the Brooklyn and take the lead, signaling his forces “Damn the Torpedoes…Full speed ahead!” The entire column of 14 ships passed safely through the mine field and took Mobile.

489. April 22, 1778. At 11 p.m. on this day in 1778, Commander John Paul Jones leads a small detachment of two boats from his ship, the USS Ranger, to raid the shallow port at Whitehaven, England, where, by his own account, 400 British merchant ships are anchored.

488. Captain Charles Stewart of USS Constitution taking on two warships simultaneously in February 1815.

487. Though unsuccessful, Desert One was audacious.

486. How USS Constitution Sailors evaded 170 guns of HMS Africa, Shannon, Belvidera & Aeolus!

485. Berlin Airlift

482. Market Garden (for a not-so-successful example)

481.Camp Century Greenland, 1959-1966.http://gombessa.tripod.com/scienceleadstheway/id9.html. A nuclear powered, under-the-ice-camp of about 200 men doing Arctic military research and testing the feasibility of siting ICBMs in the Greenland icecap. Project Iceworm was the code name for a US Army Top Secret proposal during the Cold War (a study was started in 1958), to build a major network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. The ultimate objective of placing medium-range missiles under the ice – close enough to Moscow to strike targets within the Soviet Union – was kept secret from the Danish government.

480. Manstein Plan, France 1940 (replaced the original von Schlieffen plan), bait the allies into the low countries, cut them in half, and take the entire region in 6 weeks.

479. 1588, english channel, England vs Spain. English ships, more maneuverable, chipped away at the snds of the Spanish Armada’s ships (arranged in an arcing format) instead of taking them head-on. Forced the Spanish ships into disorder, and over a few days, whittled them down to near-insignificance…forced the Spaniards into a roundabout route around Scotland back home…but were destroyed in a storm before they could make it back, save 50…out of 130.
Audacious to say the least.

478. 1970, USAF and Army Special operations crash land an HH-3 helicopter in the middle of the Son Tay prison complex in North Vietnam in an attempt to rescue 65 American POWs. The operation is carried out perfectly, but the prisoners were moved a few months earlier to different accommodations.

477. Operation Dynamo, the “miracle of Dunkirk” in WW2

476. Battle of the River Plate, 1939.  One of the greatest psyche-outs in naval annals. Spee literally pulverized UK’s Ajax, Achillies(NZ), and Exeter.  One’s fire control was out, another’s main gunnery was out, the third was mauled but intact.  GS was also damaged, and thinking the UKs 3 were still coming after him (most would’ve broke off by then),  he made for Montevideo…where he was told to leave within 72hours. GS was relatively intact, despite some damage, and could have re-engaged.  Thinking there were more heavies coming (via the radio traffic of the 3, who remained, even though they would have been cut to pieces had the GS came out to face them),  Capt Langsdorf scuttled the Graf Spee without a battle.  3 days later he shot himself. Sheer audacity, and well executed…using nothing but guile.(the truly genius strategist finds ways to war without battle-Sun Tzu)

475. The bayonet charge of Joshua Chamberlain on July 2, 1863 at Little Round Top during the Gettysburg battle.

474. Bridge at Dong Ha

473.  ‎1918 Battle of Belleau Wood

472. June 1995 rescue of Scott O’Grady

471. Battle of the Bulge, with the Germans scraping up enough armor, soldiers and fuel to give the US and Allied Armies a real good scare

470. USS ENGLAND taking the bull by the horns, and sinking 6 Japanese subs in less than 2 weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by admin in Air Force, Army, Aviation, Coast Guard, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Homeland Security, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Navy, Piracy, Proceedings, Soft Power | read comments (25)

Well, we had to deal with Vietnam’s Buddhist monks a few decades ago … I guess now it is China’s turn.

Vietnam said earlier this week that six Buddhist monks will soon take up residence on one of the Spratlys. The monks, who reportedly will stay for the next year, belong to the government-sanctioned wing of the Buddhist church.

In all seriousness though, this has all the ingredients; oil, sea lines of communication – and overlapping claims that adds fuel to it all.

…to re-establish abandoned temples on islands that are the subject of a bitter territorial dispute with China.

The temples were last inhabited in 1975, but were recently renovated as part of efforts to assert Vietnamese sovereignty over the Spratly Islands.
…
The monks’ delegation is being organised by the local authorities in the southern province of Khanh Hoa, which exercises administrative responsibility for the islands on behalf of Vietnam.

It has also paid for the refurbishment of the island shrines. They include three larger temples and several smaller ones.

The monks have been appointed abbots of the island temples for a six-month period.
…
Along with China and Vietnam, parts of the islands are claimed by the the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan.

To get the Monks there takes just a boat – to keep them there or to kick them off takes the ability to project naval power ashore.

Is this a provocation? Of course. The billion dollar question is; what national security concern is this of ours? If it isn’t, when does it become one, if at all?

Posted by CDRSalamander in Foreign Policy | read comments (7)
Tags: China, South China Sea, Vietnam

Many of the decision points in our lives can be sorted into four specific guiding questions.  They provide an excellent means of evaluating our decision, our choices, and most effectively melding what we need with what we can afford.   The questions can correspondingly apply to selecting a college, or to  prospective employment.  They work well when designing and building a house, or buying a car.  Purchasing insurance.  Even when deciding on marriage.  What are these four questions?

• What can I live with?
• What can I live without?
• What can’t I live with?
• What can’t I live without?

Simple questions, really.  But their answers require a good deal of thought.

They are also questions that should be asked when developing National Security Strategy, and its subcomponent, National Military Strategy.  Those questions need to be asked as we determine the size, posture, and capability of our military and its supporting industrial base.   Those four straightforward questions must eventually be asked of our Navy at a number of different levels.

The first is to address the size and capabilities/capacity of our Navy.    What can we reasonably expect our Navy to do?  For how long?  In how many places at once?  Hard questions that demand realistic and informed discussion.   Currently, we have a Cooperative Strategy that cannot be executed under any but the most benign conditions on the world’s oceans.   How long are we going to continue to make promises to ourselves and our allies that we cannot keep?   What are we willing to have the courage to say openly that we cannot do with current capabilities?

Related to the above queries, but not identical, is to ask how big will our Navy be.   Numbers tossed around in the previous decade and a half range anywhere from 340 down to the current 285-ish.  (The disparity of 55 ships is equivalent to the strength of two Royal Navies, so it isn’t trivial.)  Yet, the budget realities and the cuts made to shipbuilding projections point to a number closer to 260, if not lower, by the end of the decade.  While it is true that 260 modern warships have tremendous combat power, it is also axiomatic that they cannot have the same global forward presence that 340 warships, some with somewhat less capability perhaps, can have.

The next level at which the four guiding questions need to be asked is the level of ship design and shipbuilding.    This cannot be done in isolation, but must be informed by serious and exhaustive discussion regarding what Admiral Zumwalt called the “high-low mix”.  How many capital ships of extensive capability are required for our missions, and how many of lesser but more appropriate capabilities does the Navy need?   It is this level in particular that the Navy seems unable, in fact abjectly refuses, to answer.   Not every ship needs every capability.   When we believe it does, we end up with multi-BILLION dollar platforms chasing skiffs off the Horn of Africa, and a fleet so expensive that the risking of a single unit for a dangerous but necessary mission becomes all but unacceptable.

There has been much discussion of those issues in the pages of Proceedings, and among Naval Officers and strategic thinkers, Naval enthusiasts, and the legions of the Great Unwashed who blog the intertubes.    One of the more interesting remarks in this regard was an assertion, perhaps rightly, that with its current philosophy and unwillingness to address the high-low question, the Navy is incapable of building a platform in between the under-gunned and unsurvivable LCS and an Aegis-capable Arleigh Burke.

So the question of the mix is not new.  Captain Jerry Hendrix wrote of it with his Buy Fords, not Ferraris in the April 2009 Proceedings.   Discussion at the last three USNI/AFCEA West conferences was rich with commentary.    In this month’s Proceedings, Norman Polmar evokes Plan URR with his A Paradigm Shift, asking whether a much larger number of STOVL carriers would be more effective than a small and likely shrinking number of $15 billion dollar CVNs.   (A hat-tip woulda been nice!)   When I asked the question of high-low mix at this year’s Shipbuilding Panel in San Diego, the panelists all but admitted that there hadn’t been much discussion on the subject, and that the goal was still 313 ships.

The final level at which those four questions above need to be asked is in the experimentation with “Optimal Manning”.   Anyone who even occasionally glances at this site knows my aversion to reducing crews of ANY equipment or weapon platform below what is required to drive, fight, fix, and maintain.  The biggest decision for the Navy has to be defining “optimal”, and to whom the term applies.   Is it “optimal” for the Navy leadership to show reduced manpower costs to our Congresscritters while our warships continue to experience serious maintenance issues and are not mission capable?    Do we want crews so thin that there is only time for eating, sleeping, and operating?   No time for training in the myriad skills and requirements of basic seamanship, damage control, or weapons proficiency?  Do we want crews that have no ability to absorb any casualties without compromise of mission?

Again, difficult questions.  Senior Navy leadership, and senior Defense Department officials, are going to have to make some hard calls.  The answer is not to exhort our Sailors to do “more with less”.   That bit of self-delusional platitude is the path to a head-on collision with the realities of combat, with usually catastrophic results.

The discussions must be informed, serious, and realistic.   And they need to be soon.   In May, USNI/AFCEA will be holding the Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach.    The theme is “Joint and Coalition Forces; The Inflection Point.  What to Hold and What to Fold?”  Without these discussions, commentary will again be nearly blind speculation, akin to a hand of five-card stud, but deciding which cards to keep and which to discard without looking at them.    If we continue to insist on playing our cards in such a way, we ought not to be surprised if the betting patterns of our potential adversaries change accordingly.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Aviation, Coast Guard, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy, Piracy, Proceedings, Uncategorized | read comments (3)

Episode 113 “To be Blunt on Afghanistan 03/04 by Midrats on Blog Talk Radio
CDR Salamander writes:

Where is the line between truth, optimism, spin, happy-talk, and lies?

Those of us who have served in Afghanistan and those serving now all have our stories. Our guest this Sunday has a few as well.

“Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
…
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. “

Using his article in Armed Forces Journal; Truth, Lies, and Afghanistan as a starting point – our guest for the full hour will be Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, US Army.

For those of us who served in earlier wars this might bring back some memories. And the common warrior question: “What is ground truth?”

Join us live at 5pm here or download the show later from the same location or iTunes.

Posted by Eagle1 in Army, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, Soft Power | read comments (3)

History shows that the national mood determines spending priorities as much if not more than even economic needs. In a representative republic, our elected officials respond to the mood and desires of their constituents in fits and starts – but usually head in that direction.

If you are making long-range plans, like military budgets and systems development, to avoid spending time and money on systems that Congress or a future Pentagon will never support for production – because they don’t meet the mood and direction the nation is going – you need to make sure you can see the big picture.

To do that, you need to make sure you are not stuck in either group-think in your small circle, or worse than that – have tunnel vision such that you are unaware of what is going on around you.

A nation and a society can often have trouble with self-reflection. In the national security arena, a professional must make the effort to read widely and deeply; seeking out not just like-minded ideas, but even more importantly contrary ideas. Better than that, make an effort to read foreign sources of opinion and analysis.

Where do you look? Well, if you want to get an outsider’s view, the Anglophere-centric The Economist is good. The English version of Der Spiegel works. The major British papers and their English language counterparts from Japan, Singapore, Al-Jazeera works too. Everyone finds their mix.

There is no nation that is more like the United States – and therefor more likely to pick up our nuanced trends – than our friends to the north, Canada. Some don’t really “get” us – but our fellow North Americans usually do.

You could do worse than to take the time to listen to a relatively objective opinion from a friend. The Canadian Conference of Defence Associations Institute (a non-partisan think-tank) has its strategic assessment out. It is well worth your time to read the whole thing, but the opening section on the United States has an interesting hook;

Americans are war-weary, disappointed with what has been achieved at great expense, and feeling exploited by ungrateful allies. Debate is intensifying over how national interests should be defined and the degree to which the security of Americans requires expenditure of lives and treasure in faraway places. There is a rising mood of disengagement which will translate into actual disengagement in selected areas no longer deemed to be in the national interest.

There will be no going back to Iraq whatever happens and 2012 will feature continued drawdown of US forces and involvement in Afghanistan. The Administration will find it very difficult to send forces anywhere in 2012 unless the security interests of the United States or those of its closest friends and allies are openly threatened or humanitarian needs are overwhelming. With the economy improving but remaining fragile, the United States would be hard pressed to finance or gain public support for any new foreign policy or defence initiative not directly in support of the supreme interests of the country.

In the event Washington cannot avoid sending forces into harm’s way in 2012, there is every indication the Pentagon would want any engagement to be short and sharp, with objectives which are as narrow and clearly defined as possible, and with little or no chance of stretching into a lengthy and complex intervention of the type which characterized the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. One should expect the Administration’s posture to prefer persuasion over force and, when diplomacy and sanctions fail, to favour the employment of military force with as much precision as possible.

If they are correct – what are the implications for the defense budget and the Navy-Marine Corps team? Are we training and equipping our forces to be ready for this in a shrinking resource environment? Are we adjusting our manpower allocations to ensure that the “high-demand-low-density” assets will be there in the right amount, or will they be put under the same haircut as everyone else?

If the American public’s mood continues along these lines – are we being realistic on what kind of budget we will have in 10-years? Are we being too optimistic, too pessimistic – or just about right?

Having served with the Canadian forces, have Canadian friends, and heck – even took the family to Canada for our summer vacation last year, I admit to being a Canadaphile – as a result, agree or disagree, I always give them a good listen.

This time, I think they about nailed it.

Hat tip T.E. Ricks.

Posted by CDRSalamander in Foreign Policy | read comments (18)
Tags: budget, Canada