Government Executive - Authors - George C. Wilson

Forward Observer: Costs of War

George C. Wilson — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In his new book out Monday, Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward quotes President Obama as telling Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "I'm not spending a trillion dollars" in Afghanistan. But guess what? The United States has already spent or committed a third of that $1 trillion on Afghanistan before Obama and his generals have launched their major offensive in the country with almost 100,000 U.S. troops.

The dollars spent or committed to combat terrorism since the attack on the United States by four hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, have been tracked down and added up in a report just issued by the Congressional Research Service. The total through the Pentagon's fiscal 2010 supplemental comes to $1.12 trillion, according to CRS, with no end in sight.

To date, the CRS report by Amy Belasco figures the extra, or "incremental," cost of adding the burden of fighting terrorists on top of what the U.S. military was already doing before 9/11 comes to $750.8 billion for Iraq and $336 billion for Afghanistan. Another $28.5 billion went for making it harder for terrorists to attack us, while $5.5 billion in the new CRS report is listed as "unallocated."

The $750 billion tally for Iraq by the nonpartisan CRS makes the Bush administration bean counters and policy makers look like fools.

Larry Lindsey, President George W. Bush's economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, estimated the Iraq war would cost $200 billion. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ridiculed that estimate as "baloney."

He and Mitch Daniels, Bush's OMB director, figured the Iraq war would cost between $50 billion and $60 billion. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, went so far as to say that Iraq's oil revenues would finance much of the reconstruction. That would be wrong, wrong, and more wrong.

So bear those predictions in mind when you hear officials estimating the total cost of the war in Afghanistan that Obama has embraced. The Woodward book makes Obama sound like a president who wants to hurry up and Afghanize the war and get U.S. troops the hell out of there as soon as possible.

President Richard Nixon tried to Vietnamize his war and failed. Obama's field commander, Gen. David Petraeus, sounds like he wants to fight terrorists forever in Afghanistan and every place else in the world. Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying this about Afghanistan: "You have to recognize that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives." In short, there is no light at the end of Petraeus' tunnel.

The upcoming midterm elections should tell us whether the voters stand with Obama or Petraeus on Afghanistan.

Substitute the word Afghanistan for Iraq and what Joint Economic Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said back on Feb. 28, 2008, will be tested in November: "It's becoming clear to all Americans -- Republicans, Democrats and independents -- that by continuing to spend huge amounts in Iraq, we're prevented from spending on important goals and vital needs here at home. The backbreaking costs of this war to American families, the federal budget and the entire economy are beyond measure in many ways, and it's becoming the first thing after the loss of life that people think about and talk about."

Congress, which so far has given presidents Bush and Obama almost all the money they asked for to wage the Global War on Terror, can be fickle if it decides a war has become more drag than lift politically.

The lawmakers gave President Lyndon Johnson and then Nixon almost every dollar they asked for to wage the Vietnam War and then turned off the money spigot. This past could be prologue for Obama if the war continues to go badly in Afghanistan and American voters sense their dollars are doing little more than making corrupt Afghan leaders richer.

But no matter which political party prevails in the elections, there is another cost elephant in the nation's living room.

This is the cost of treating the visible and invisible wounds of the veterans who are fighting these wars. House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., is among those in Congress who have looked at the tidal wave of bills about to crash over us and recoiled in horror.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War write that "the Pentagon keeps two sets of book[s]. The first is the official casualty list posted on the Defense Department website. The second, hard-to-find set of data is available only on a different website and can be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This data shows that the total number of soldiers who have been wounded, injured or suffered from disease is double the number wounded in combat."

The authors assert that this second list can be "tied directly to service in the war," thus pushing up the tidal wave of veterans' bills Filner and other lawmakers are already worried about to new heights.

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Forward Observer: The True Cost Of Assassinations

George C. Wilson — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

How ironic it will be if historians blame Barack Obama, a liberal who used to teach constitutional law and became the first black man to be elected president of the United States, for turning our democracy into a police state because he provoked terrorist attacks on our homeland by authorizing so many assassinations abroad.

I think attacks on our vulnerable country in retaliation for assassinations Obama authorized are a chilling but real possibility. To combat such attacks, American citizens would lose freedoms they now take for granted, such as the ability to move throughout the United States without carrying identification papers to show police day and night.

I hope some congressional committee or subcommittee will delve into the cause-and-effect relationship between White House-approved assassinations abroad and retaliatory attacks here at home. After all, the Founding Fathers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gave Congress, not the president, the powers to "provide for the common defense" and "to declare war." So the House and Senate, no matter which party controls them next year, have every right to ask whether Obama's authorized assassinations are indeed helping "the common defense" or sowing the seeds for our own destruction as a democracy.

The New York Times revealed in its lead story on Aug. 15 what it termed "the Obama administration's shadow war against al-Qaida and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries -- from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife -- the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic aircraft and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

"Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged in contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan," the Times reported. "For example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed."

An armed drone drops its bomb on a group of suspected terrorists to assassinate them from the air while commando teams, often operating in the dark, do their assassinations on the ground. If the strikes were revealed, Obama and his chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, would almost certainly defend them as the United States exercising its right of self defense. The families of the victims, especially the innocent ones, would almost certainly consider the killings murder and seek revenge.

I don't think most Americans understand how long a memory would-be avengers have, especially in a tribal society. I certainly didn't until I was humping around with a Green Beret team in Bosnia as a correspondent in 1996. A Bosnian saw me with the Green Berets, suspected I was a Western news correspondent and came running out the front door of his home to talk to me. In halting but understandable English, he described to me how the men buried under the crosses on his front lawn had been murdered. He said their throats had been cut. I was taking notes furiously because I thought he was talking about murdering by the Serbs in the recent ethnic war. I stopped taking notes when the distraught man revealed that he was talking about murders committed on his front lawn in the previous century.

Without using the word assassination, Brennan opened the kimono a bit on the White House rationale for it in a little noted speech before the Center for Strategic and International Studies on May 26:

"To deny al-Qaida and its affiliates safe haven, we will take the fight to al-Qaida and its extremist affiliates wherever they plot and train. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond, we are not only delivering severe blows against the leadership of al-Qaida and its affiliates, we are helping these governments build their capacity to provide for their own security, to help them root out the al-Qaida cancer. . .

"We often need to use a scalpel, not a hammer. When we know of terrorists who are plotting attacks against us, we have a responsibility to take action to defend ourselves -- and we will do so. . .

"As a result of our actions, we have subjected the core of al-Qaida led by Osama bin Laden, to unprecedented pressure. In the last 16 months alone, hundreds of al-Qaida fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed. We have inflicted significant damage on their capabilities. Today it is harder than ever for this network to move, raise funds, recruit, train and plot attacks, all of which makes the American people safer. . . "

Is this "scalpel," to use Brennan's term, that Obama and his designated hitters are reportedly using increasingly on al-Qaida going to do America so much more harm than good that a latter-day Defense secretary will say, like Robert McNamara did about the Vietnam War, "We were wrong, terribly wrong?" Congress owes it to itself and the rest of us to find out how extensive Obama's approved assassinations have become and the likely consequences to our homeland.

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Forward Observer: Just Do It

George C. Wilson — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

What is going on here with the "don't ask, don't tell" law? That law says military superiors cannot ask the men and women serving under them whether they are gay and the gays cannot tell anybody about their sexual orientation. What is really going on is that President Obama, the Pentagon and the majority of Congress are all trying to be half pregnant.

The Pentagon commissioned a private firm, Westat, to spend about $4.5 million to ask 400,000 active duty and reserve military men and women what they think about serving alongside gays. But nobody -- not Obama, not the Pentagon, not Congress -- will be bound by what they say. So critics see the survey as an elaborate attempt to put lipstick on a pig; to provide political cover for those favoring the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."

All this circumlocution must have President Harry Truman spinning in his grave today. For it was on this day 62 years ago -- July 26, 1948 -- that the feisty president from Independence, Mo., issued Executive Order 9981 to integrate the armed forces, a slow and often painful process for many in uniform but one that eventually led to making the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps the nation's most equal-opportunity employers for blacks and other minorities.

It took guts for the straightforward Truman to defy lions in Congress by ordering integration through his own executive order, not legislation that would have never passed in his day. Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., was the leader of the lion pride Truman defied. Russell before and after Truman issued Executive Order 9981 tried to amend the Selective Service law so draftees could choose whether they wanted to serve in segregated or integrated military units. Russell lost that fight.

Yet here we are 62 years later with a White House and Congress still feeling the need for political cover -- this time a survey -- to give full rights to another minority, homosexuals who want to serve their country without having to stay in the closet.

Thanks to the Palm Center research institute attached to the University of California, Santa Barbara, I read the questions the Pentagon is asking through Westat. Some of the questions made me wonder whether the framers of the questions had ever been in combat when bullets were flying through the air. Examples:

• "Among all the factors that affect a unit's performance in combat, how much did the belief that the service member was gay or lesbian affect the unit's combat performance: A lot? Some? A little? Not at all? No basis to judge?"

I was in combat in South Vietnam in 1968 and learned there that the Pentagon's question is irrelevant when bullets are flying. The only thing you worry about is whether the trooper next to you, the nearest sergeant and the officer giving orders over the field radio knows his job and will do it well -- not whether he or she is gay.

Similarly, I was deployed on the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy for seven-and-a-half months. The ship's commanders suspected several of the communications technicians -- the sailors who performed the sensitive job of coding and decoding secret messages -- were gay but did not care as long as they did their jobs well and did not flaunt their sexual orientation. Performance is what counts in a high-stress military environment, not sexual orientation.

• "If 'don't ask, don't tell' is repealed, how, if at all, will your military career plans be affected? I will stay longer than I had planned. I will think about staying longer than I had planned. I will think about leaving sooner than I had planned. I will leave sooner than I had planned. My military career plans would not change. Don't know."

These questions are irrelevant and unanswerable until the troopers see what impact, if any, the scrapping of "don't ask, don't tell" will have on them. In the meantime, such questions are just a shot in the dark. Assuming "don't ask, don't tell" is repealed, it will be up to a unit's leaders, gay or not, to make a military career challenging and interesting.

• "If a wartime situation made it necessary for you to share bathroom facilities with an open bay shower with someone you believe to be a gay or lesbian service member, which are you most likely to do? Mark 1. Take no action. Use the shower at a different time than the service member I thought to be gay or lesbian. Discuss how we expect each other to behave and conduct ourselves. Talk to a chaplain, mentor or leader about how to handle the situation. Talk to a leader to see if I had other options. Something else. Don't know."

Guess what? There are already thousands of gays in the American armed forces. Gays and nongays in uniform worked it out long ago, as have nonmilitary high schools, colleges and offices. Getting "don't ask, don't tell" out of the law books and welcoming declared gays who want to serve their country into the armed services will be a step forward, not backward.

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Forward Observer: Have Guns, Will Travel

George C. Wilson — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Is Congress willing to keep financing wars like the ongoing one in Afghanistan in perpetuity? Gen. David Petraeus, Congress' military darling, sounds like he is counting on it. Just read what he said at his June 29 confirmation hearing with no senator bothering to draw him out on the implications of his statement for the United States generally and the American military specifically:

"We cannot allow al-Qaida or other transitional extremist elements to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our homeland or on our allies. ... It is going to be a number of years before Afghan forces can truly handle the security tasks in Afghanistan on their own."

Would Petraeus therefore recommend to President Obama that he send American troops into Yemen or any other country on the planet if terrorist groups decided Afghanistan had become too hot for them, folded up their tents and set up training camps and crude bomb factories elsewhere? "Have guns, will travel" seems to be Petraeus' M.O.

Is the present Petraeus effort to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people therefore just one battle in an endless war against terrorism? If so, why are allies like Germany and the Netherlands, who are closer to the terrorist hotspots than the United States, pulling in their horns and taking troops out of Afghanistan rather than sending more in?

What if leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban imitate their North Vietnamese and Vietcong forbearers and go all-out to launch their version of a Tet Offensive to turn more Americans and lawmakers against the war in Afghanistan? I helped cover the Tet Offensive for The Washington Post in 1968 and came to realize that it was a military defeat for our then-enemies but a huge psychological victory for them. Members of the House told me at the time that they were shocked to see pictures of the bad guys right inside the U. S. Embassy in Saigon after being assured by the White House and Pentagon that this would never happen.

What will Obama and Petraeus, his new commander of the war in Afghanistan, do if the money-hungry leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan work out a deal with the bad guys and tribal leaders and demand that American troops leave their countries?

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., is at the forefront of those in Congress who want to hand the Afghan war over to Afghan forces as soon as possible. Afghanization of the war is his stated objective. But like the South Vietnamese before them, Afghanization looks to most Afghans surveyed like depending on the foxes to guard the chickens, as was often the case with Vietnamization.

I was in Danang in 1972 with translator Chuck Benoit when Vietnamization was in full swing. South Vietnamese civilians told us it was frighteningly common for South Vietnamese soldiers and cops to back up their trucks to private houses in the middle of the night, break in, carry the family's furniture into the trucks and drive away.

On Thursday, The Washington Post published the results of polling by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, which indicated Afghans see their police and judges as the most corrupt officials in their entire government, especially in rural areas.

The Post story quotes Lorenzo Delesgues, co-director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, as saying this about corruption in Afghanistan: "It has become a phenomenon that is more widespread and really institutionalized. It has become easier for people to get away with corruption." Afghan corruption is stinging salt being thrown into the physical and mental wounds of American and NATO troopers fighting and dying in Afghanistan, as well as their families. Especially their families.

How does Petraeus' "have guns, will travel" philosophy on combating terrorism, wherever it sprouts, square with Obama's statement on page 23 of his recently issued "National Security Strategy" white paper about the greatest danger Americans face? Obama or somebody working for him wrote this: "The American people face no greater or more urgent danger than a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon." If such a horror should occur, who would respond to treat the victims if the state's National Guard units were not home but fighting terrorists overseas?

If Obama or his successor, as well as Congress buys into Petraeus' go-anywhere approach to fighting terrorism, we would have to expand the active duty military beyond the 1.4 million men and women out there now.

By the Pentagon's admission, we had active-duty military people in 150 foreign countries in 2009. On top of them, we have an unknown number of shadowy military and CIA operatives abroad with U.S. government licenses to kill. Does Congress, which the Founding Fathers empowered to provide for "the common defense," know about them?

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would label me as "one of those quagmire guys." And he would be right. I see how Obama got into Afghanistan. I don't see how he's going to get out with honor.

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Forward Observer: Unmarked Exit

George C. Wilson — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

"I know how to get in," the late, great Marine Corps Commandant Robert Barrow said as we reviewed explosive conflicts around the world, "but I don't know how to get out without showing the white feather."

This one sentence the Marine sage laid on me while I was covering the military for The Washington Post describes the cross of Afghanistan that President Obama picked up and is now carrying on his back. He has promised the American people to start pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011, just 13 months from now.

The same Barack Obama promised as both presidential candidate and president to do a lot of other things he has not yet done, like shutting down the prison holding terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Does he dare waffle on getting our men and women out of Afghanistan, too, without becoming a one-term president?

That question is already dividing Congress and will become even more divisive if the military and political situations in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our field commander in Afghanistan, has already slowed the much ballyhooed U.S.-Afghan offensive in Kandahar in hopes of winning over more Afghan hearts and minds while Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton find themselves in the ludicrous position of propping up the same Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, who has threatened to join the same enemy our troops are fighting and getting killed by -- the Taliban.

I was covering the Vietnam War for the Post when one South Vietnamese leader after another whom we were propping up left office, usually under a cloud, causing then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to slap his forehead in despair. But at least none of those South Vietnamese presidents going in and out of Saigon's revolving door threatened to join the Vietcong or North Vietnamese. Why does our government keep betting on the wrong horses?

If last week's blah-blah hearings by the Senate and House Armed Services committees did nothing else, they showed how eager Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate panel, was to turn the Afghan war over to the Afghans and how opposed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the committee's ranking member, still is to beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops there on the date certain of July 2011, no matter what. Their opposing stances at the Senate hearing illustrated the great divide that has opened up in Congress on Afghanization versus Americanization of the war:

Levin. "Our top priority must be training, mentoring and partnering in the field with Afghan troops and placing them in the lead in operations against insurgents backed by U.S. and coalition support. What is disturbing and hard to comprehend is that the training mission still does not have enough trainers to process all the Afghan recruits who are signing up. Of the more than 5,200 trainers that we need, only about 2,600 are on the ground. It's totally unacceptable that this shortfall persists" and that NATO allies have not sent the trainers to Afghanistan they promised. "The Afghan army has about 125,000 troops available - more than we do." (The United States has about 94,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan today and plans to have 98,000 in country by year's end.) "But it is our troops that are concentrated where the fighting is heaviest and where Afghanistan's future may well hang in the balance. Why aren't more Afghan army troops leading security operations in the South?"

McCain. "No matter how much it has been explained and fixed with caveats, the decision [by Obama] to begin withdrawing our forces from Afghanistan in July 2011 seems to be having exactly the effect that many of us predicted it would. It's convincing the key actors inside and outside of Afghanistan that the United States is more interested in leaving than succeeding in this conflict. And as a result, they're all making the necessary accommodations for a post-American Afghanistan. With ongoing difficulties in Marjah, a delayed offensive in Kandahar, growing concerns about the Afghan government, troop commitments still lagging from NATO and the final units of our own surge not set to reach Afghanistan until Sept. 1, it now seems increasingly clear that hoping for success on the arbitrary timeline set by the administration is simply unrealistic. It's time for the president to state unequivocally that we will stay in Afghanistan until we succeed."

At the Senate and House hearings, both Gen. David Petraeus and Pentagon policy chief Michele Flournoy spotlighted how much progress was being made in building up the Afghan army and police force. But nobody explored with them whether the Afghans in the boonies really want any troops or cops, American or Afghan, camped in their midst to boss them around and possibly demand bribes and commit other crimes. I remember before World War II that mothers in my own New Jersey town forbade their daughters from having anything to do with the soldiers in the "From Here to Eternity Army" stationed at Fort Dix. Nor did I read in the transcripts of the hearings either Petraeus or Flournoy spelling out how and when, if ever, the United States is going to get out of Afghanistan without, as Marine Commandant Barrow put it, "showing the white feather."

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Forward Observer: Nuclear Time Bomb

George C. Wilson — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Standing up like a red lighthouse of warning above the otherwise murky prose in President Obama's new National Security Strategy document is this statement: "The American people face no greater or more urgent danger than a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon."

Obama himself or somebody on his White House team decided to think about the unthinkable and then write it down. Now it is the uncomfortable obligation of senators and representatives returning to work this week to read those thoughts and ponder what it could mean to the folks back home.

"Indeed," continues the white paper, "since the end of the Cold War the risk of a nuclear attack has increased. Excessive Cold War stockpiles remain. More nations have acquired nuclear weapons. Testing has continued. Black markets trade in nuclear secrets and materials. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal a nuclear weapon. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered in a global nonproliferation regime that has frayed as more people and nations break the rules."

The "no greater danger" warning comes shortly after a terrorist parked a vehicle full of explosives in New York's Times Square. Luckily, very luckily, the inept terrorist did not know what he was doing, so the explosives did not go off. Just imagine if he did know what he was doing and set off a nuke. Thousands, perhaps millions, could have been killed and whole blocks of the city obliterated.

If Obama has been bold enough not only to think about but write it down, it seems to me Congress has the obligation to hold hearings on how ready, if at all, our individual states are to respond to the consequences of such a nuclear attack. Urgent questions Congress needs to ask include these:

-- "Governor, if your state is attacked with a terrorist's nuke and you don't have nearly enough police, firemen and medical people to treat all the victims, what will you do? How will you get clean water? Combat radiation sickness? Bury radioactive bodies? Supposing most of your National Guardsmen have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Where do you go for help?

-- "Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a terrorist parked his vehicle in Times Square with nonnuclear bombs. If those bombs had gone off, how many people would have been killed and wounded? Would your responders have been overwhelmed? What if the terrorist's bomb had been a nuke?

-- "Mr. Scientist, supposing the U.S. government detected a nuclear weapon in a ship or plane headed for the United States. Supposing the ship or plane ignored all attempts to stop it or force it to turn around and entered our territorial waters or air space. Is there a way to destroy the suspected nuclear weapon before it went off without poisoning the sea or atmosphere? If not, how long would the sea or atmosphere remain poisoned? What would be the consequences for people, animal and plant life? How would those consequences compare to BP's disastrous oil leak?

-- "Adm. Michael Mullen, before you became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President George W. Bush said the following on June 1, 2002, at West Point: 'Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. Our security will require transforming the military you will lead, a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world.' Admiral, it is eight years later. How prepared is your military to detect a nuke in a 'dark corner of the world' and neutralize it?

-- "Defense Secretary Robert Gates, you wrote in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs that 'the most lethal threats to the United States' safety and security -- a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack -- are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time.' Please tell us in the Congress -- whom the Founding Fathers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution put in charge of providing 'for the common defense' -- how we can help you to meet this 'main security challenge of our time.'"

What more do presidents have to say, ones as far apart philosophically as Bush and Obama, and what more has to happen beyond the Times Square bombing attempt and the BP oil leak, to get the hired hands of the American people, senators and representatives, to take a systematic, informative look at this clear and present danger?

To repeat, Obama himself has just finished saying on page 23 of his little-publicized National Security Strategy white paper that "the American people face no greater or more urgent danger than a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon." If nothing else can inspire a bipartisan response this election year, that presidential warning should.

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Forward Observer: Gates' Swan Song?

George C. Wilson — Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In pleading for sanity in providing for "the common defense," as the Constitution puts it, Defense Secretary Roberts Gates sounds to me like a man who (1) plans to announce his resignation from Fort Fumble right after the midterm elections and leave office by the end of this year; (2) wants to burnish his reputation as a reformer before he becomes just another Washington has-been or (3) has persuaded President Obama to take the defense budget off the White House "don't touch" list, starting next year.

Whatever his reasons, Gates is clearly fed up with the status quo in the military-industrial-political complex.

Whether he can really change anything, given the supine Congress that regards building weapons as a public-works program and raising military pay as its sacred duty, is questionable. But he is at least shouting wake-up calls. Hooray for Bob Gates.

His recent shouts:

-- May 3 at Navy League Sea Air Expo, National Harbor, Md. "The U.S. operates 11 large [aircraft] carriers, all nuclear-powered. In terms of size and striking power, no other country has even one comparable ship. ... The virtual monopoly the U.S. has enjoyed with precision guided weapons is eroding -- especially with long range, accurate anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles that can potentially strike from over the horizon. Our current plan is to have 11 carrier strike groups through 2040," with each new carrier costing $20 billion, including the cost of the aircraft on board. "Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?"

I was on the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy for seven-and-a-half months in 1983-84 to write a book on that floating city. Carrier pilots pointed out to me that all enemy anti-ship missiles would have to do to stop operations was damage the flight deck, not sink the carrier. Parked planes on the deck are highly flammable and the launching gear is complex and difficult to repair.

Gates also stabbed the Marine Corps' sacred cow, amphibious landings, in the heart. "We have to take a hard look at where it would be necessary or sensible to launch another major amphibious landing -- especially as advances in anti-ship systems keep pushing the potential launch point further from shore. ... In the 21st Century, what kind of amphibious capability do we really need to deal with the most likely scenarios?" The Marines already have the use of the Navy's 10 large-deck amphibious ships "while no other Navy has more than three, and all of those navies belong to allies or friends."

"We have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 billion to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers," or $20 billion if the cost of aircraft is included. "We simply cannot afford to perpetuate a status quo that heaps more and more expensive technologies onto fewer and fewer platforms."

-- May 7 at the Army's Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "We have to think about things differently. ... The Army keeps wanting to fight the Fulda Gap" where generals during the Cold War feared Warsaw Pact forces would invade Western Europe; "the Navy keeps wanting to fight [the Battle of] Midway" of World War II; "the Marine Corps keeps wanting to do Inchon," the amphibious landing during the Korean War; and "the Air Force keeps wanting to fly airplanes" at a time unmanned ones are the weapons of choice in Pakistan.

The Navy wants a fleet of 313 ships -- "we're about 285, 286 right now -- [but] we are not going to get there if we can't get the costs of shipbuilding under control ...We put so much technology" in ships and aircraft "that we can't buy nearly as many as we need ... Our original plan was to buy 132 B-2 bombers. At $2 billion apiece, we bought 20." Soviet leader Joseph Stalin "once said that at a certain point, quantity has a quality of its own. I believe that."

-- May 8, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kan. "The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, opened a gusher of defense spending that nearly doubled the base budget over the last decade, not counting supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given America's difficult economic circumstances and parlous fiscal condition, military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny. The gusher has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time. ... The goal to cut our overhead costs" will dominate the Pentagon's construction of the fiscal 2012 Defense budget now under way, Gates promised. He said before his formal speech that the president and Congress "will look hard" before leaping into "another military operation that would cost us $100 billion a year."

By the Pentagon's count, it has active duty troops in about 150 countries. A case can be made that America's excessive militarism is sapping its strength. Gates seems to realize this.

The key question is whether his boss, Obama, realizes this as well and will pull in the country's horns before smarter terrorists follow the one who tried to blow up part of New York to avenge our attacks against them on their home ground.

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Forward Observer: Rational Defense

George C. Wilson — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Even Ripley of "Believe It Or Not" fame would not believe it. But the United States as it slides further down the deficit gulch is spending more than $1 trillion a year on national defense despite fighting only two little wars against enemies with no ships, warplanes or tanks.

Yes, I know. President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates broadcast smaller figures for national defense, $700 billion plus for this and the coming fiscal year. What they fail to say is that their totals do not include the money to protect our homeland from terrorists nor the billions the Energy Department spends on nuclear warheads.

Certainly protecting the homeland and providing warheads are part of the powers our Founding Fathers gave Congress, not the president, in Article I section 8 of the Constitution: "The Congress shall have power to... provide for the common Defence" and "to declare war."

The more accurate total for describing what Obama is asking Congress to let him spend in fiscal 2011 on "the common defense" is more than $1 trillion. I arrived at about $1,048,800,000,000 as the real total cost of providing for the common defense by adding up these figures in Obama's new budget: $548.9 billion in the Pentagon's discretionary budget; $4.2 billion in obligations it has to pay; $159.1 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; $18.8 billion Energy is expected to spend this coming budget year on nuclear weaponry; $7.6 billion on miscellaneous accounts related to the common defense. This comes out to about $738.6 billion for national defense but leaves out many of the other billions slated to be spent on the common defense.

The seldom-discussed amounts in Obama's budget but definitely linked to providing for the common defense include $43.6 billion for the Homeland Security Department; $122 billion for the Veterans Affairs Department; $65.3 billion for defense-related international affairs; $25.9 billion contributed by the Treasury Department for defense needs; $53.4 billion for interest on the Pentagon's Healthcare fund and defense portion of the national debt.

GAO recently studied the Pentagon's buying of its major weapons and reported that the taxpayers were being hosed as defense contractors ran up almost $300 billion in overruns on their originally agreed-upon prices in fiscal 2008.

Yet Obama has publicly vowed not to cut his new defense budget. Why shouldn't the Obama Pentagon contribute to reducing the deficit, which will weaken, if not bankrupt, the country no matter how many warplanes, guns, tanks and ships we buy?

No end of banana republic dictators have been toppled after their people found they could not eat guns, tanks or planes.

And no less an authority then Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a former bean counter for his state government, said during a recent hearing: "The whole enterprise of the budget of the United States is utterly disconnected from reality. We have now had the Chinese warn us publicly and privately that they are increasingly reluctant to finance this debt" of the United States by buying the Treasury bonds that keep our government functioning. "We're on an utterly unsustainable course in every aspect of our spending, in every aspect of our revenue, because the gap between the two is utterly unsustainable."

Two ways to make our government sustainable are to cut federal spending and raise taxes.

Gates could save billions in spending, for instance, by killing the trouble-plagued F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, as the former Pentagon chief weapons tester, Thomas Christie, recommended in my last column.

But Obama will not do that during this midterm election year any more than he will raise taxes.

The majority of members of Congress now regards buying weapons, no matter how much they cost or how poorly they perform or how little they match the threat, a legitimate public works program because of all the jobs they provide back home.

"We can't have a circumstance in which precious dollars that are being allocated for the nation's defense are wasted," Conrad further lamented. "And the only way we can determine whether or not that occurs is if we have auditable records."

It seems that since I was a little boy, Pentagon leaders have been promising Congress to straighten out their admitted accounting mess to make their spending auditable. Alas, many Pentagon accounts are still not auditable.

While Congress and the Pentagon have promised to reform the way weapons are bought to reduce cost overruns, I don't think that will happen until there is a cultural change within the military-industrial-political complex.

If he did nothing else right, the late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara early in his tenure persuaded Congress and the public that more jobs would be created by closing surplus military bases and using the money spent on keeping them open on civilian projects. Obama, the great communicator, needs to sell that argument anew to make providing for the common defense a rational endeavor.

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Forward Observer: Kill The F-35?

George C. Wilson — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

But Thomas Christie, whose last Pentagon job was director of weapons testing and evaluation for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told me in recommending cancellation of the F-35 that "it's not going to happen" even though it should.

The kind of politics that wastes taxpayers' dollars will win out, Christie predicted in a voice of resignation, if not disgust. He said government leaders will keep the F-35 JSF alive no matter how sick it gets so they will have something to show for all the money they spent on it. The JSF could end up costing the taxpayers as much as $329 billion for 2,443 planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Christie's analyzing of warplanes and their weapons dates back to 1955, when he worked as a civilian for the Air Force at Eglin Air Force Base in Texas. He said the Air Force and Navy fleets of airplanes have become dangerously small and old with no quick fixes in sight except buying planes like the F-16 and latest F-18 already in production. They are over the growing pains now plaguing and delaying the F-35.

Christie contended the ailments afflicting old planes the Air Force and Navy keep flying beyond their normal retirement age pose a bigger threat to the lives of American pilots than the foreign planes in any hostile air force.

Is the Pentagon asking too much of the F-35, thus explaining some of its delay and cost overruns? Some aeronautical experts have long argued that more smarts should be built into a warplane's weapons and less in the plane itself.

A combat pilot can yank and bank his fighter bomber so hard the gravitational forces knock him unconscious. A missile is bloodless and therefore does not lose consciousness as it yanks and banks on the way to the target.

Looking at the warplanes the United States has sent against the bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan and will need for the expanding global war against terrorists, Christie sees a worrisome gap.

He argues the United States needs more planes that can fly low and slow like the A-10, which also armors the pilot against rifle bullets. "It's all-important to see and identify the target before you launch your weapons," he said. The pilot of a jet flying high and fast over a mountain in Afghanistan might think he sees Taliban hiding behind rocks and launch his bombs, only to learn he killed civilians.

Christie's recommendation to the Air Force is to look for A-10s in its bone yards that still have combat life left in them and send them to Afghanistan to support Green Berets and other stealthy units hunting the Taliban. He added it's past time for the Pentagon to design and buy a modern version of the A-10.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. field commander in Afghanistan, has insisted that pilots make sure before dropping their bombs that the suspected Taliban are not Afghan civilians. When I went to Hanoi after the Vietnam War had ended, I learned first hand that blinding airplane speed can indeed be blinding. North Vietnamese army veterans told me that all they had to do to hide from American jets patrolling the Ho Chi Minh trail was to hold thick branches above their heads and stop moving.

Largely because of its complicated software and computerized gadgetry, the estimated price tag for one JSF has jumped from $50.2 million in 2002 dollars to $80 million to $95 million in 2002 dollars.

Christine Fox, director of Pentagon cost assessments, gave those estimates to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 11. The Government Accountability Office told the committee "there's still significant risk on the program," noting the Pentagon still intends to buy 300 JSFs off the Lockheed Martin production line before development tests designed to detect flaws are completed.

Christie would plain give up on the short takeoff and vertical landing version of the F-35 the Marines so dearly want. Too complicated, too expensive in his opinion. Order the Marines to use the Air Force version of the F-35 and save millions of dollars and months, if not years, of delays is Christie's recommendation. This from a man who knows warplanes better than anyone on Defense Secretary Robert Gates' team.

As one who reported in the 1960s on former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's failure to build the same basic airplane for three services and sell it to many foreign countries as well, the TFX, or tactical fighter experimental, I see the same kind of trouble ahead for the JSF.

If the Pentagon and Congress insist taxpayers buy the JSF despite its problems, why put hundreds of JSFs into production before the development models have been thoroughly tested? Even Ashton Carter, Pentagon procurement czar, has testified that "the level of concurrency" -- finding the flaws in aircraft test models at the same time you are producing uncorrected ones - "is unprecedented." What's the rush?

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Forward Observer: QDR is a Quite Disappointing Report

George C. Wilson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

President Obama's big thinkers fussed from February 2009 to January 2010 over what to put in this year's sweeping, congressionally mandated review of future defense strategy that would justify what the Pentagon was doing and might do in the future if Congress voted it enough money.

The formal name of this kabuki dance that bureaucrats perform every four years is Quadrennial Defense Review or QDR. The QDR is one of those documents that government insiders argue about endlessly to make sure they do not say anything offensive, provocative, informative or even interesting. Few outsiders read the QDR, if they have heard of it at all.

The House Armed Services Committee recently did hold a quickie hearing on this year's 105-page QDR during which Chairman Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., gave the Pentagon's chief author, policy director Michelle Flournoy, a brush of a kiss while ranking member Rep. Howard (Buck) McKeon of California gave her a bit of a slap.

Said congressional veteran Skelton: "Overall I find the 2010 QDR to be a solid product and superior to the last several iterations that we've had ... Still, the way the QDR seems to treat the force-sizing construct is to advocate for a force that is capable of being all things to all contingencies."

"It's tough to determine what the priority is, what the most likely risk we face may be, and what may be the most dangerous," McKeon said. "It seems that the QDR makes no significant changes to major pieces of our current force."

Complained McKeon: "This QDR provides a force structure for the years we're in today when the purpose of the review is exactly the opposite: to prepare for the likely conflicts of tomorrow. One must ask what's new here? If this is really a vision for the defense program for the next 20 years, as the statute requires, then why does the QDR lay out a force structure for the next five years, not to mention one that looks a lot like today's force? The QDR is supposed to shape the department for 2029, not describe the Pentagon in 2009."

Flournoy answered in typical diplo-speak: "Our efforts in this QDR really have evolved around the imperative to reaffirm our commitment to the health of America's all-volunteer force, to rebalance our program and capabilities to fight both the wars that we're in today and also prepare for future contingencies and to reform how and what we buy."

"Rebalance" is the euphemism Defense Secretary Robert Gates uses to try to persuade Congress to cancel some of the clunkers he does not want to keep buying, like the Boeing C-17 transport, to free up money to buy the here-and-now smaller weapons to help our troops fight back the bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for Flournoy's words about changing the way the Pentagon chooses and buys weapons, Gates is but the latest in a long line of defense executives to promise reform. Last year he had all he could do to convince Congress to stop buying F-22 fighters which cost $350 million a copy and don't help win the war against terrorism. Gates will find the reform hill even steeper this election year as lawmakers balk at killing any weapon, however unnecessary, that provides jobs back home.

I spent months in 1997 going behind the scenes at the Pentagon and Congress to find out about all the wheeling and dealing that went into the writing of the QDR that year. "I had high hopes for the QDR," Gen. Ronald Fogleman, former Air Force Chief of Staff, told me. "In my view, for the QDR to be a success there was going to have to be some fairly significant realignment among the [armed] services."

But Fogleman said his hopes for meaningful reform were dashed when the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, sent a two-star general to Fogleman's office to deliver this message: "The chairman would like to have the QDR turn out to be as close to the status quo as we can make this thing work. His message is: 'We don't need any Billy Mitchells,'" the general said, referring to Army Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell, who revolutionized the use of air power by demonstrating in 1923 how bombers could sink Navy warships.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote this assessment of the 2010 QDR: "From my perspective the QDR takes positive steps to support the Department's efforts to rebalance the force and reform processes. It provides needed focus on improving stability and defending our vital interests in the Middle East and South Asia as well as continuing to be good stewards of the health of the force and balancing global strategic risk."

But Shalikashvili's mind-set about preserving the status quo still dominates the thinking in today's Pentagon. So, despite some promises of change around the edges in this newest QDR, I see the 2010 report headed for the Pentagon's huge mausoleum of unread or unheeded documents which didn't make a significant difference.

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Forward Observer: Weyand's Message

George C. Wilson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Gen. Frederick Weyand, our last Vietnam War field commander who died a few days ago, had some advice that President Obama should follow if he wants the American people and their hired hands in Congress to stick with him as he expands his topsy-turvy war in Afghanistan.

"Vietnam was a reaffirmation of the peculiar relationship between the American Army and the American people," Weyand said in a farewell message to his beloved Army in 1976. "The American Army really is a people's Army in the sense that it belongs to the American people, who take a jealous and proprietary interest in its involvement," the far-seeing general continued.

"When the Army is committed, the American people are committed. When the American people lose their commitment, it is futile to try to keep the Army committed. When the American people lost their commitment after the Tet offensive of 1968 [in South Vietnam], for all intents and purposes the war was lost," Weyand said, even though most post-audits have concluded that, militarily, the Tet offensive broke the back of the Viet Cong attackers.

Weyand's message, one Obama must heed if he is to be successful in his escalated Afghan war, is that the psychological support of the American people for such hard-to-explain wars in distant countries like South Vietnam and Afghanistan is far more important than troops, guns, bombers and tanks. Weyand elaborated in an interview with the late Col. Harry Summers in 1998.

"The fundamental reason" we lost the Vietnam War "was the lack of clear-cut and understandable political and military objectives," Weyand said. "That was true from top to bottom. When Clark Clifford took over as [President Lyndon Johnson's] secretary of Defense after Tet 1968, he found that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no concept of victory and no plan to end the war. And that was the case in Saigon as well.

"In 1974 Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard did a survey and found that almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the [Vietnam] war were uncertain of its objectives," Weyand continued. Kinnard concluded that "'mirrors a deep-seated strategic failure: the failure of policymakers to frame tangible, obtainable goals.' It was this lack of a sense of purpose that finally turned the American people against the war."

I heard the frustration about that lack of clarity while on the ground in South Vietnam for The Washington Post in 1968. An Army lieutenant colonel who commanded a battalion in South Vietnam's rice bowl in the Delta bitterly said to me after a frustrating day of chasing the Viet Cong: "Maybe if we can't explain this war, we shouldn't be here."

I was also sitting across the table from Clifford in a Post luncheon in 1968 when he told us he and others in the Johnson administration "are in a struggle for the president's mind. I told the president that 'your generals are leading you down the primrose path. They couldn't tell me how they plan to win in Vietnam no matter how many more men we send them.'"

Lamented Weyand to Summers: "It was this lack of a sense of our purpose that finally turned the American people against the [Vietnam War]. It was the fall of 1967 when polls showed that for the first time more Americans were against the war than in support of it. And I think that shift took place because of public suspicion that the government didn't know what it was doing."

Weyand said he told his North Vietnamese counterpart in peace negotiations in Hanoi shortly before Saigon fell in 1975.

"'You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.' He pondered that remark a moment and then replied: 'That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.'"

Yes, Obama spent weeks quizzing his generals and admirals on not only how to prevail in Afghanistan but also how to get out of there. He explained on national television why he was going to put almost 100,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan to help the Afghan army and police force neutralize the Taliban, pacify the country and build schools and clinics.

But it's not enough to explain the strategy just once in while. His fellow countrymen lead lives in which Afghanistan is out of sight, out of mind most of the time. But mounting casualties in Afghanistan, bloody deeds of the Taliban televised into American living rooms, exposes on the defections and corruption of Afghan allies our sons and daughters are risking their lives to help will push the Vietnam era question to the fore of the public mind: Why the hell are we still there?

Obama is the best communicator since Franklin Roosevelt warmed the American people with his Fireside Chats. Why not take Weyand's advice and explain at least once a month in updated Fireside Chats what is happening in Afghanistan and why we are there? Otherwise, he runs the risk of Weyand's fate in Vietnam: win every battle militarily but lose the war psychologically because the American people deserted him.

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Forward Observer: F-35 Challenges Gates

George C. Wilson — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

An internal Navy briefing obtained by CongressDaily suggests, without saying it right out, that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ballyhooed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates will cost so much to buy and fly that the service might have to find a cheaper plane to fill up its carrier decks.

For those of us who watched the reputation of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as a manager nose dive in the 1960s when he could not produce a carrier plane the Navy would accept, these newly expressed Navy doubts about the F-35 have a familiar ring that challenges Gates.

McNamara's supposedly super-duper plane that he wanted the Air Force, Navy and, for a bit, the Marines to buy and fly was first called the TFX, for Tactical Fighter Experimental, and later the F-111. The F-35, the Pentagon's biggest aircraft program, is supposed to be flown by the same three services. But F-35 critics contend its cost -- pegged at $122 million a plane in the Pentagon's latest Selected Acquisition Report -- is out of control and its worth as a fighter is questionable.

The Naval Air Systems Command conducted a hush-hush briefing earlier this month on the cost of buying and flying the F-35. One of the dizzying briefing charts obtained by CongressDaily and shown to Navy leaders states that it will cost almost twice as much to fly the F-35 for an hour as it does the existing F/A-18A through D models and AV-8. The comparative per flying hour costs are $30,700 for the F-35 of the future and $18,900 for the other two. Aviation experts suspect Navy leaders felt using the new F/A-18 E and F flying hour costs would have reduced the shock value of the comparison.

"JSF will have a significant impact on Naval aviation affordability in the FYDP [future year defense plan] and beyond," another chart warns. That's the bureaucratic way for the Navy to warn Gates and other decision-makers that the F-35 will cost so much to buy and fly that there won't be enough money in future Navy budgets to procure enough of the planes to fill up the holes on carrier decks, according to veteran aerospace translators.

The Government Accountability Office has complained about the murkiness of F-35 cost projections, expressing in one such report "concern about what we believe is undue concurrency of development, test and production activities and the heightened risk it poses to achieving good cost, schedule and performance outcomes."

Gates so far has been dismissive of such warnings, declaring last summer at the Lockheed plant in Fort Worth where the F-35 is being built that the United States "cannot afford not to have this airplane." But neither he nor anyone else knows for sure what the F-35 will cost or be able to do in the sky because no complete prototypes have been fully tested.

Winslow Wheeler, former cost analyst at GAO and the Senate Budget Committee and now director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, is among those who believe the fly-before-buy approach to procurement is the only way the Pentagon will ever be able to give the taxpayer a deserved bang for his buck. Wheeler would stop production of the F-35 right now and fully test prototypes of the plane to see what they can actually do.

Some congressional committee or subcommittee should care enough about the taxpayer's buck to investigate the cost and performance problems on the F-35, as the Senate investigations subcommittee led by the late Sen. John McClellan, D-Ark., did for years in hearings on the TFX, which I covered first for Aviation Week and then for The Washington Post.

Among the many questions Congress needs to ask Gates and his deputies is why rush the F-35 into production before testing it fully, and what is the threat out there to our planes already flying that justifies pushing up the federal deficit by spending $298.8 billion on 2,456 F-35s, or $122 million each counting research and development costs?

Gates, before he signs any more checks for the F-35, would be well served by reading the McClellan subcommittee's final report of Dec. 18, 1970, on how that other multiservice plane, the TFX, turned out.

The Navy refused in the end to buy the TFX for its carriers. It bought the Grumman F-14 Tomcat instead.

Said the Senate report: "The history of the TFX program is one of a series of management blunders, a series of poor decisions at the highest levels of the Department of Defense which compounded error upon error as the TFX program stumbled along year after year. The TFX program has been a failure.

"Financial resources were squandered in the attempt to make the TFX program produce satisfactory results. The total failure of the attempt to produce a satisfactory F-111B [the Navy version of the TFX] has caused a long and unnecessary delay in filling the Navy's request for a new carrier-based fighter."

As McClellan might tell Gates if the senator were still with us: "There ain't no education in a second kick of a mule."

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Forward Observer: Back To Tit For Tat

George C. Wilson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

What will al-Qaeda and the Taliban do in response to President Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by putting 100,000 U.S. troops on the ground there?

The options the bad guys have are scary and impossible to stop. The Vietcong demonstrated this in 1968 when I humped around with U.S. troops in Vietnam for The Washington Post. I saw how a South Vietnamese farmer could tend his rice paddy by day and burn down at night the barn U.S. money had built in his hamlet or village. Villagers who cooperated with American occupiers were routinely killed.

This set of bad guys in Afghanistan can not only commit atrocities but beam the results around our wired new world.

It is not as if Obama is waging a one-sided fight for the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban will respond sooner or later to his surge because, rightly or wrongly, we are back to the tit-for-tat strategy when the Vietnam War was escalating.

If al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders decide that showing the world pictures of Afghans beheaded because they cooperated with U.S. forces would reduce Obama's following rather than galvanize it, they will not hesitate. The same calculation will be made about televising pictures of mutilated GIs. War is not nice.

To keep from being a one-termer, Obama will have to answer the same question again and again the rest of this term: Why are we still fighting in Afghanistan when we have so many other problems at home? We've been there eight years already for no good reason.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University and retired Army colonel and Vietnam veteran, is at the forefront of those who saw no good coming out of Obama's surge. His argument against putting more boots on the ground was this: "The tribal chiefs who actually run Afghanistan are best positioned to prevent terrorist networks from establishing a large-scale presence. As a backup, intensive surveillance complimented with precision punitive strikes (assuming we can manage to kill the right people) will suffice to disrupt al-Qaeda's plans. Certainly that approach offers a cheaper and more efficient alternative to establishing a large-scale and long-term U.S. ground presence which, as the U.S. campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, has the unintended effect of handing jihadists a recruiting tool that they are quick to exploit."

If our lawmakers really mean to look before they leap to support Obama's escalation, they owe it to themselves and the rest of us to call in terrorism experts to testify about what they think al-Qaeda and the Taliban will do next in response to this surge. It's important to look through the other end of the telescope. Both the good guys and the bad guys are fighting for hearts and minds.

These are among the key questions: Will the bad guys just slip across the border to Pakistan to further terrorize that country to the point its fragile government falls and loses control over its nukes? What are the chances of suicide bombers coming to the United States to blow up Obama's motorcade? Or a congressional dinner? Or a Wall Street crowd during lunch hour? Would televised pictures of terrorists' atrocities galvanize or turn off the public about supporting Obama's new war in Afghanistan?

The big difference between President Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam and Obama's is that the establishment's sons are not being drafted to fight in a country that does not threaten us directly.

The fighting and dying are being done mostly by our out-of-sight, out-of-mind version of the French Foreign Legion, the all-volunteer force.

There has been no national referendum on going to war for more than half a century. Congress has turned over its constitutional power to declare war to a series of presidents. George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 to capture weapons that did not exist and Obama has made Afghanistan his war with a half-pregnant promise to start withdrawing troops, maybe, in July 2011.

Richard Nixon backed out of the Vietnam quagmire by turning the war over to the South Vietnamese military under what he called Vietnamization. Obama is going to try the same thing with Afghanization.

I see the same three flaws dooming both "izations:" (1) Lack of public respect for South Vietnam's and Afghanistan's central governments; (2) Lack of motivation and skill in the native military; (3) Lack of patience by the American people for wars that seem endless and irrelevant to their daily lives.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would dismiss me "as one of those quagmire guys." But I'll go with one of the few wisemen on Vietnam, the late Brigadier Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., who knew war up close and personal, not as a peacetime, stateside instructor pilot like Rumsfeld.

"With respect to Vietnam," Palmer, in his book The 25-Year War: wisely wrote: "Our leaders should have known that the American people would not stand still for a protracted war of an indeterminate nature with no foreseeable end to the U.S. commitment." That's on Page 190 if members of Congress want to look it up.

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Forward Observer: Another Looming Disaster

George C. Wilson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The all-volunteer military that took over from the draft in 1973 has become so expensive it will either have to get smaller, not bigger as Congress desires, or declare the civilian equivalent of bankruptcy and resume the unpopular draft calls of the Vietnam era.

This is the prediction of retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, a fully certified expert on military manpower. He was the longtime aide for former Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn, D-Ga. Punaro himself chaired the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, which issued a report last year on how those forces should be transformed. He was also on President Obama's short list for Army secretary.

Our all-volunteer military "has priced itself out of the market" under the flat or reduced Pentagon budgets Punaro sees in our future, he said.

But nobody in Congress or the administration wants to look hard how we're riding to the poorhouse in Cadillacs because none of the ways to stop the skyrocketing cost of recruiting, fielding and retiring the military is politically appealing: raid the Pentagon's hardware, maintenance or research accounts; settle for a smaller military force or go back to the draft.

Yet military manpower costs are in the same kind of "death spiral" former Pentagon analyst Franklin Spinney rightly predicted would lead toward the nightmare of pilots taking turns flying the one aircraft their service could afford to buy because of its high cost. The new Air Force F-22 fighter, for example, costs about $350 million for just one plane, when research and development costs are included.

In 2005, the Government Accountability Office took a dizzying plunge into how much it costs to recruit, train, pay, house, care for and pay retirement, health and other benefits for one active duty soldier.

It threw up its hands, sounding this complaint: "No single source exists to show the total cost of military compensation. Tallying the full cost requires synthesizing about a dozen information sources from four federal departments and the Office of Management and Budget." The Pentagon should appoint a compensation czar to keep track, GAO said.

Its auditors made an educated guess that, in fiscal 2004, the all-volunteer military was costing, when averaged out, $112,000 a year for every trooper and officer on active duty. The cost has gone way up since 2004 because Congress and the Pentagon have heaped more money on the military to save it.

Of the 1.4 million military men and women on active duty, not counting activated Reservists, only about half are deployable to battlefields around the world because so many are in overhead jobs like handing out towels in a gym, Punaro lamented. This means the troopers who know how to fire a rifle or drive a Humvee are sent to Iraq and Afghanistan again and again.

A smaller Army and Marine Corps would crash head-on into the plans of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the field commander in Afghanistan, to get enough additional U. S. troops from Obama to put a full-court press on the densely populated areas of Afghanistan.

The most recent CIA estimate of Afghanistan's population is 28.4 million people. Let's say about half that number live in densely populated areas threatened by the Taliban. Applying accepted counterinsurgency doctrine that it takes one soldier to protect 50 civilians, McChrystal would require 300,000 troops to protect 15 million Afghans. Where would all these protectors come from even if McChrystal gets 100,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan? Certainly our NATO allies are not going to send in the other 200,000. And the Afghan people don't trust their own army and cops to protect them.

Recall that at the end of 1968 the United States had 536,100 U.S. personnel in South Vietnam and a native military numbering 820,000 men and women and still lost the war in a country whose population was then 16 million, a little over half Afghanistan's.

Gen. David Petraeus, McChrystal's boss, directed the writing of the Army's new field manual entitled "Counterinsurgency." That manual states that "a counterinsurgency effort cannot achieve lasting success without the host nation government achieving legitimacy." The corruption that plagued the election of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai means McChrystal will be starting his pacification effort from behind the goal line, no matter how many additional troops Obama sends him.

Because the future of today's all-volunteer military will largely determine what the United States can do at home and abroad to combat terrorist and other threats, some unit of Congress should demand the Pentagon answer questions like these: What is each person in our active duty force costing the taxpayer today counting everything? What will that cost be 10 years from now? How will you curb or pay that rising cost? Is it economic folly to pay salaries and benefits to officers for 60 years who only served for 20 years? How many military aviators got flight pay while filling desk jobs on active duty and then received tax free disability payments upon retiring? What are your plans for transferring military people out of jobs civilians could do?

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Forward Observer: Atonement

George C. Wilson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A conscience-stricken member of the House Armed Services Committee is writing a book called "My Daddy's Not Dead Yet" in hopes it will atone for what he now considers his sinful vote to empower former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003.

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., whose district includes the sprawling Marine base of Camp Lejeune, told me the title was inspired by a little boy who feared his Marine father would be killed in Iraq.

The setting for Jones' searing moment in 2007 was a classroom in the Johnson Elementary School at Camp Lejeune. He had been invited to read Dr. Seuss to the kids. Jones did that; then asked for questions.

"My daddy's not dead yet," said a little boy. "My daddy's not dead yet," the boy repeated. Jones said he reeled as if punched in the gut, a wave of guilt washing over him. The remark devastated him because he knew deep down that he had played go-along-politics with the life of the little boy's father instead of "listening to God" and voting against the House resolution in 2002 that authorized Bush to go to war in Iraq. "I profess to be a man of faith," Jones said, "but I didn't vote my conscience."

"My Daddy's Not Dead Yet" will set forth Jones' beliefs and concerns about America's out-of-control militarism and current spending spree. Any money his book makes will go to those treating the wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

"The American people have no idea of what's coming as it relates to taking care of those veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," Jones said.

Some physicians who have studied the extent and cost of treating the mentally wounded have told me it will overwhelm both the government and private medical systems.

The little boy's stinging remark also has compelled Jones to look hard at President Obama's plans for combating the Taliban in Afghanistan and stabilizing that fractured country. There will be no go-along vote for Jones this time.

He has been meeting with retired generals to discuss the pros and cons of escalating the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. He said several of these generals on his impromptu board of education have urged him to vote against any Obama plan that calls for sending tens of thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

One told him the Army and Marine Corps are worn out. To ask them to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan could break them, one general warned Jones.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the field commander in Afghanistan, is said to want as many as 40,000 more American troops in Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 to be on the ground there by year's end.

"We're trying to police the world," Jones lamented. "Every great nation prior to America that tried to police the world has failed economically. That's why I tell people that I'm a Pat Buchanan American. I want to stop trying to take care of the world and fix this country. Our problems are so deep that there is no easy way to fix them."

Jones was a Democrat like his late father, Rep. Walter Jones Sr., D-N.C., who rose in the House to become chairman of the former Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, until 1993 when the younger Jones joined the Republican Party. Since his election to the House in 1994, Jones' tangles with Bush over Iraq have prompted House Democratic leaders to urge him to rejoin their party, something he is not ready to do -- at least not yet.

Jones and others in Congress are gearing up to ask the Obama administration tough questions about its new plans for Afghanistan. Questions that all of us need answered include these:

How many of the additional troops you want for Afghanistan have already served there or in Iraq? How many are being held in the military beyond the time they signed up for under stop-loss authority? How many National Guard personnel would be mobilized? What have military and civilian operations in Afghanistan cost U.S. taxpayers to date? How much more would be spent there if Congress approved Obama's proposals for Afghanistan? What is your best estimate of how many more Americans would be killed and wounded in Afghanistan if Obama's plan were implemented? How long would U.S. troops have to occupy Afghanistan to stabilize the situation? What demands or benchmarks will you impose on the Afghan government? What is your exit strategy? What is your definition of success for Afghanistan? Why have past pacification efforts by the U.S. military failed, such as the Marines' Ink Blot strategy in South Vietnam? Was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof right when he wrote on Oct. 22 that "standard counterinsurgency ratios of troops to civilians suggest we would need 650,000 troops (including Afghans) to pacify the country?" Is your proposed escalation really necessary? What is the threat to America to justify it? Are you not setting up the U.S. military for another demoralizing, Vietnam-like failure in Afghanistan? What will you do if the Taliban and al-Qaida simply lie low or move their forces into Pakistan or another nearby country? Go after them there? Is this not a war without end?

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Forward Observer: Through Iran's Eyes

George C. Wilson — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Just before Iran gets back to dominating the front page again, let's look at the deeds -- not words -- of the United States and Israel through Iran's end of the telescope. The ugly truths Iranian leaders and their people see go a long way toward explaining why they are so determined to get the Bomb.

First of all, the United States is the only country on Earth that actually killed thousands of civilians by incinerating them with nuclear bombs. Yes, I know. It was during World War II when the Japanese were considered all bad guys. But the truth is that the United States government has lots of blood on its hands when it warns the Iranians not to build the bomb or else.

A study financed by the National Science Foundation estimated that the Little Boy uranium-235 bomb dropped from our Enola Gay B-29 bomber on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killed 80,000 to 140,000 Japanese instantly and injured 100,000 more.

The Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb dropped from our Bock's Car B-29 bomber on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, killed 74,000 and injured 75,000 more, according to the same study. Fatal radiation sickness was a side effect of our two nuclear bombings.

After the war, American presidents -- including Harry Truman, who approved dropping Fat Man and Little Boy -- looked with alarm at the furious efforts of the Soviet Union and China to get the Bomb. The Soviet Union tested its first one in August 1949, and China joined the nuclear club by testing its first bomb in October 1964.

There were plans in the Pentagon's bottom drawer to slow Soviet and Chinese nuclear bomb programs by bombing their facilities. But the stickier questions back then are the same ones that hang over plans for bombing Iranian plants today: How do you bomb nuclear material without shooting poisonous radioactive material into the atmosphere where upper winds could carry it far and wide and kill innocents? And if bombers and/or missiles just hit with conventional explosives the Iranian machinery for making the Bomb, avoiding the nuclear material itself, would the temporary setback inflicted be worth the storm of world protest bound to follow?

Up to now, presidents have clamped the claws of hawks in their midst who wanted to bomb Soviet, Chinese and now Iranian nuclear bomb facilities before they became lethal. U.S. and Soviet leaders eventually settled for keeping nuclear pistols at each others' temples all through the Cold War.

This strategy of mutually assured destruction was based on the premise of "I won't if you won't, and if you do, I'll kill you dead with all the nukes you'll miss in your surprise strike."

So far, MAD has kept these two biggest nuclear powers from pulling the trigger.

Even if Iran makes good on its promise to let International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors study its newly disclosed plant at Qom on Oct. 25 to convince world leaders it is pursuing nuclear energy, not the Bomb, hawks in this country, Israel and elsewhere will not believe it. They will argue that Israel can have the Bomb but Iran cannot -- a double standard if you're looking through Tehran's end of the telescope.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates in its latest Military Balance report that Israel possesses "up to 200 nuclear warheads" that could be put aboard its Jericho 1 and 2 missiles to hit Iran. A fair but uncomfortable question for Obama, Congress and others to ask themselves is this one: If mutually assured destruction kept the United States and Soviet Union -- the two scorpions in the bottle during the coldest days of the Cold War -- from nuking each other, would Iran's possession of the Bomb have the same sobering effect on Israeli and Iranian leaders?

Iran seems hellbent on getting the Bomb, sanctions or not, sooner or later, so it's time to think about the unthinkable.

Israel has demonstrated to the world that it is willing to resort to invading another nation's air space and bombing its nuclear facilities to delay its pursuit of the Bomb. Exhibit A is Israel's bombing on June 7, 1981, of Iraq's nuclear reactor bought from France.

The bombers were American-made F-16s escorted by American-made F-15 fighters. Still shrouded in mystery is the Israeli bombing of a suspected nuclear development facility in Syria on Sept. 6, 2007.

Way back in the presidency of John F. Kennedy, his secretary of State, Dean Rusk, came to lunch at The Washington Post and told us reporters and editors that Israel had the Bomb and that he had warned its ambassador that the United States would take a dim view of Israel ever using it. "We won't be the first," Rusk said the ambassador told him. When the ambassador reached Rusk's office door to exit, he added, "And we won't be the second."

There's one more thing for Obama to worry about.

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Forward Observer: Obama the Pragmatist

George C. Wilson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

As a forward observer ancient enough to have covered the Vietnam War from the field and from Washington, I see President Obama the pragmatist winning out over President Obama the egotist in taking his next steps in Afghanistan. This was not the case with President Lyndon Johnson, even when most of the American people had decided Vietnam was a war without end.

"You know what Ho Chi Minh is saying?" Johnson asked the editor of The Washington Post in one of their many one-on-one conversations at the White House while I was covering the Vietnam War for the paper. "He's saying f--- Lyndon Baines Johnson. Well, nobody gets away with saying f--- Lyndon Baines Johnson."

So Johnson kept sending his generals what they asked for until he had more than half a million service men and women on the ground in Vietnam and in nearby launching pads like air fields in Thailand.

Johnson's presidency went down the drain because he could not bear the thought of letting Ho Chi Minh and his successors beat him, even though tape recordings in the public domain have him confiding to his close friend, the late Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

A broken-hearted Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968. His longtime Republican rival, Richard Nixon, succeeded him. Nixon eventually handed the war over to the South Vietnamese under Vietnamization and negotiated a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese broke the peace treaty, conquered the South in 1975, and unified the country into today's Vietnam -- a big U.S. trade partner.

Could Obama suffer a similar fate in Afghanistan? In contrast to Johnson, what I've seen Obama do so far suggests he is more pragmatist than egotist, though he has plenty of ego. Yes, he will make a stand in Afghanistan so it doesn't look like he is cutting and running from the war he has adopted as his own. But I don't think he will give his generals everything they ask for, as Johnson did. What I'm hearing from people who claim to know Obama's thinking is that this president will lean toward Gen. Stanley McChrystal, field commander in Afghanistan, but not fall over for him. This new "surge" in troops and weapons will have lots of Obama's strings attached.

I'm not reading from a top secret McChrystal document like my former Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward did when he posted the general's status report recently. But Obama clearly does not want to be a one-termer.

He knows full well most Americans and many of their hired hands in Congress are sick of the eight-year Afghanistan war. They worry we're wading into another quagmire. Moving front and center in the public mind is the question of why are we spending so much blood and money to support a corrupt government in Kabul.

Obama, to address these and other concerns, will almost certainly send fewer than the 40,000 additional U.S. troops McChrystal is said to want on top of the 68,000 scheduled to be in Afghanistan by year's end. Obama is likely to show light at the end of the tunnel by announcing a timetable for reducing U.S. troop presence. In response to the corrupt Afghan election, Obama is likely to demand Afghanistan's central government achieve benchmarks to keep U.S. troops and money coming. As for an exit strategy, Obama will accelerate training and cleansing of the Afghan army and police so he can back out via Afghanization, following in Nixon's footsteps. He also is likely to approve more arms-length strikes against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan whenever our armed drones detect them.

Although McChrystal talks about U.S. troops camping out month after month with the Afghans to protect those building schools, digging wells, tilling fields and giving medical treatments, I think Vietnam pacification efforts wave a big red flag.

Our NATO allies have little stomach for protecting dangerous areas and the U.S. Army and Marines are too small and weary to do it all. The Afghan army and policy are widely feared by the Afghan people they are supposed to protect. And yet no country, especially fiercely independent and tribal Afghanistan, likes to have foreign troops in their face. And where would all those U.S. troops needed for pacification duty come from?

The dirty little secret of why American citizens have given presidents Bush and Obama so much time to show progress in Iraq and Afghanistan is that few in the establishment have sons and daughters in those half-wars.

With the end of the draft, the all-volunteer force has turned out to be an overworked and underappreciated version of the French Foreign Legion. The burden of protecting our democracy is not being shared equally in our society. The burden is being carried mostly by the have-nots.

Because of the draft, Johnson had to contend with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters. One published account, which sounds credible, has the beleaguered Johnson asking his assembled generals what they propose to do when protesters fill up the ellipse behind the White House to come for the president.

The clock is ticking slower for Obama than it did for Johnson because of no draft. But the ticking for Obama is getting louder.

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Forward Observer: A Second Chance

George C. Wilson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Neither Congress nor the press asked the president, the secretary of Defense, the secretary of State and military leaders the kind of tough questions that might have kept our commander-in-chief from sending thousands of young American men and women to die in the quagmires of Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan.

But our lawmakers, who at bottom are the hired hands of the taxpayers, have a new chance to assert the war-making powers the Constitution gave them. They can worst-case the plans to wade deeper into the Afghan quagmire.

Here are some questions that need to be asked of the principals:

* Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Would you agree that today's relatively small Army would be stretched to the breaking point by sending thousands more soldiers to Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 due to be on the ground there by year's end?

How many troopers within that 68,000 will be on their second and third tours to the region? How many of them are being held beyond the time they signed up for under stop-loss authority? How many of them are National Guardsmen and from what states? Where is a governor to go for backup if his state is hit by a terrorist attack, his police and firemen are overwhelmed and there is no Guard to call up because it is deployed overseas?

What is your personal opinion of how many U.S. troops should be deployed to Afghanistan? How long should they stay there? What is your definition of victory or success in Afghanistan?

You have talked about the need to send more anti-bomb specialists to reduce casualties from improvised explosive devices. It takes 11 months of intense training at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base to train a soldier, sailor, marine or airman in the intricacies of finding, disarming and destroying an IED. These explosive ordnance disposal specialists are already in short supply. Where are you going to get additional ones for Afghanistan?

* Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What is your personal opinion, not the administration's party line, of how many U.S. troops would be required to pacify Afghanistan and protect civil affairs workers who would be in remote villages digging wells, building schools, providing health care? How many non-U.S. NATO protectors can you count on getting and where are they willing to serve in Afghanistan? How long would pacifying and protecting forces have to stay in Afghanistan? How would you meet emergencies elsewhere in the world with so many troopers tied down in Afghanistan? What is your definition of success in Afghanistan?

* Gen. Stanley McChrystal, new field commander in Afghanistan. What is your personal opinion on how many U.S. troops would be required to beat back the Taliban and al-Qaida and pacify Afghanistan? How long would the American force have to stay in Pakistan? How many civil affairs workers would you need to improve life in Afghan villages? Where are they going to come from and in what number? How many armed Afghan soldiers and police would you need to protect the villagers and the people digging wells, building schools and running health clinics? Do you trust the Afghan protectors or would you salt their units with U.S. soldiers and Marines to train the Afghans and keep them from getting out of line? Do you have the authority to pursue the Taliban and/or al-Qaida into Pakistan? Would the Pakistani government allow you to wipe out their base camps in Pakistan? If not, how can you hope to win?

* Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Do U.S. ground forces have the right to pursue the Taliban and al-Qaida into Pakistan? To wipe out their base camps? If the Taliban and/or al-Qaida moved their bases into Saudi Arabia, what could we do about it? Is that a possibility? Do you think Afghan villagers feel a loyalty to their central government or to warlords who can protect them? Many of your employees said "Hell no, we won't go" when asked to go into the Iraqi countryside. What will you do if they refuse to go into Afghanistan?

After trying to win hearts and minds in South Vietnamese villages, the Marines wrote this in one of their many learned reports: "One overriding fact continually presented itself about the success or failure of civic action in rural construction programs: No success was possible without adequate security. The peasant in the rural areas, who must live with the VC (Vietcong) both night and day, is reluctant to overtly support any program that does not provide adequate security for himself and his family against VC terrorist tactics."

Madam Secretary, if you agree that Afghan villagers do not trust their central government or its forces, where is that kind of security going to come from? Do you agree that the following statement by one of your predecessors, Colin Powell, about the Vietnam of yesterday applies to the Afghanistan of today? "When we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support. ... In Vietnam we had entered into a half-hearted, half-war with much of the nation opposed or indifferent while a small fraction carried the burden." Are we headed down the same path?

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Forward Observer: Lessons Not Learned

George C. Wilson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

As your forward observer on things military, I see President Obama being confronted in Afghanistan with the same hard choice that confronted President Richard Nixon in Vietnam: Send in more U. S. troops to pacify the country or hand that tough job over to the natives as you leave the country waving glittering promises.

Nixon opted to leave it to the South Vietnamese government and its army to clean up the mess we made in their country at the same time they had to defend themselves against the widely feared invasion by North Vietnam. Among the glittering promises Nixon waved as he backed out of South Vietnam was the peace treaty Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated in Paris and got signed in 1973.

Congress, thoroughly sick of the Vietnam War and its protesters, heaved a sigh of relief at Nixon's Vietnamization of the war. The lawmakers went on to deny the South Vietnamese the money they were counting on to buy ammunition and other war gear to combat the North Vietnamese. The North invaded and conquered the South despite the peace treaty, creating a unified Vietnam in 1975.

Before the Vietnam War escalated to where the United States had a half-million troops on the ground in South Vietnam, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told us editors and reporters at The Washington Post that if the United States lost the Vietnam War, "You can kiss Thailand goodbye." This was the Kennedy administration's dead-wrong Domino Theory: Either stop communist North Vietnam or watch other countries in the region fall to the communists.

We were "wrong, terribly wrong" in the way he and other American leaders ran the Vietnam War, the late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote in his 1995 memoir, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam." That war killed about 58,000 American service men and women and, by some estimates, as many as 1 million Vietnamese combatants and 5 million Vietnamese civilians.

U.S. Census Bureau figures testify to the fact that the United States and the still-communist-but-unified Vietnam have developed a healthy trading relationship since the war ended in 1975. In May 2009, the latest month of trading figures on record, Census reports that the United States sold $248.7 million worth of goods to the new Vietnam and bought $984.1 million from its former enemy. So what was that Vietnam War about anyway?

In Afghanistan today, as in Vietnam yesterday, American military leaders are stressing the need to win the hearts and minds of the people. But as I saw for myself as a combat correspondent in Vietnam in 1968 and 1972, the job of keeping the bad guys out of remote villages day and night -- especially at night when it is easy for guerillas to hit and run under the cover of darkness -- is a constant, uphill struggle requiring thousands more troops than combat commanders think they can spare for pacification.

This is why the front page, off-lead story in The Washington Post of July 11 rang so true to me. It said Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new field commander in Afghanistan, "has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama's strategy for winning the war is to succeed ... Obama has been cautious about making any additional military resources available beyond the 17,000 [American] combat troops and 4,000 military trainers he agreed to in February. That will bring the total U. S. force to 68,000 [in Afghanistan] by fall."

The reliability of native forces in Afghanistan is as big a question mark -- and probably bigger, given their fractured loyalty to Afghanistan's central government, tribal and religious leaders and the Taliban -- as the one that hung over South Vietnamese troops during the Vietnam War.

President Lyndon Johnson opted to fill the yawning troop gap with U.S. forces, increasing their presence in South Vietnam from 16,300 at the end of 1963, the year he took over from the assassinated President Kennedy, to 536,100 at the end of 1968. In the same period, 1963 through 1968, the South Vietnamese armed forces grew from 243,000 to 820,000 combatants. The figures come from the authoritative "Vietnam War Almanac" by Harry G. Summers Jr.

So even with a combined armed force of 1.3 million U.S. and South Vietnamese troops, we could not pacify South Vietnam nor win the war against the North. Afghanistan for centuries has been defeating would-be pacifiers and occupiers. Now Afghanistan is Obama's war. His plan is to increase the Afghan army from 85,000 to 134,000 by 2011. But McChrystal believes the Afghan army must be much bigger to assure Obama's success in Afghanistan. But who would an even doubled Afghan army and police force be loyal to? Probably not the Afghan central government.

This sets the stage for McChrystal to ask for more U.S. troops as a quicker, surer fix for pacifying Afghanistan.

Obama knows full well that escalating the American presence in Vietnam ruined Johnson's presidency. He does not want to take "Johnson Avenue" in Afghanistan. He doesn't want to lose his first war, either. The struggle for the president's mind on Afghanistan is under way.

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Forward Observer: Obama's Defense Reckoning

George C. Wilson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama, who already plans to spend even more on everyday national defense -- not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- in his next four years than former President George W. Bush had projected, will fight another big battle this week against the congressional-military-industrial complex. Obama will try to keep the job-hungry Senate from putting more billions of dollars in the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill than he thinks the country needs.

Obama lost his first Pentagon budget battle June 25 when the House voted 389-22 to authorize millions of dollars for weapons the administration did not want. The poster child for the House add-ons was the Air Force's F-22 fighter plane. The Pentagon itself has priced this plane at over $350 million a copy if the research and development costs the taxpayers have already paid for are counted.

In response to the House rolling Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the traditionally restrained White House budgeters warned Congress that they would recommend that Obama veto the authorization bill if the extra $369 million the House added as a down payment for 12 more F-22s cleared Congress.

"The collective judgment of the service chiefs and secretaries of the military departments suggests that 187 F-22s is sufficient to meet operational requirements," said OMB. "If the final bill to the president contains this provision, the president's senior advisers would recommend a veto."

The F-22 was designed in the Cold War to combat a threat that no longer exists: clearing European skies of Warsaw Pact air forces in case the Cold War went hot. The Air Force now advertises the F-22 as an air superiority aircraft with a limited bombing capacity. The plane has yet to play a role in the Global War on Terror and perhaps never will. The cited price tag is derived from the Pentagon's own Selected Acquisition Report estimating that 184 F-22s will cost $64.5 billion, or $350.8 million each, including R & D.

Rather than argue that more F-22s are needed to combat threats from comparable foreign aircraft, House proponents chose to focus instead on jobs lost if Obama got his way and Lockheed Martin was ordered to stop production at 187 aircraft.

That politicians regard the Pentagon budget as a public works program came through loud and clear in statement after statement. This recession panic has bred a philosophy of any job is a good job, needed or not.

Gates found himself shouting down a well when he tried to convince fellow Republicans and Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee May 13 that "we are not cutting the F-22 force. We are completing the program of record that was established in 2005 in the Bush administration. That then called for 183 F-22s. That's the program of record that two different presidents; two different secretaries of defense, and two different chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has thought was the right number." Gates and Obama drew the line at 187 aircraft after asking Congress for four more planes in the FY09 war supplemental enacted last month.

Congressional fears about losing jobs if military procurement is cut is likely to keep driving up the top line of that part of future defense budgets that do not contain money for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even before today's recession panic set in, Obama's regular, non-war-related defense budget was higher than the comparative budgets projected by Bush. The comparison in billions of dollars of budget authority:

Fiscal year	Bush	Obama
2010	549.8	562.8
2011	556.3	570.5
2012	565.1	579.5
2013	575.6	590.0

Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., are allied with Obama in trying to stop production of the F-22. But the fact that Levin could not get his way on the F-22 in the bill his own committee reported out shows the steepness of his uphill floor fight.

If past is prologue on this issue, as it usually is, Obama will probably craft some compromise to avoid a veto. There is just too much stuff in the authorization bill the military needs.

President John F. Kennedy in 1962 butted heads with House Armed Services Chairman Carl Vinson, D-Ga., about whether more money should be authorized for the RS-70 bomber. Kennedy was against doing it; Vinson strongly for. But Kennedy had the votes to get his way and Vinson knew it. So during a walk together in the White House Rose Garden, Vinson, known as the Swamp Fox, pulled out of his pocket a letter that would save face for him by ordering an RS-70 study. Kennedy took Vinson's letter, tuned it up a bit and sent it to Congress, where it was happily accepted without producing the RS-70 bomber.

But Kennedy did not have a deep recession to contend with in 1962 as Obama has on his hands now. So persuading the pols to kill F-22 jobs Lockheed Martin has spread around most of the 50 states will be a big test of how strong Obama can be when pitted against the military-industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about as he left office in 1961.

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Forward Observer: War Without End?

George C. Wilson — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Is this Global War on Terror going to last forever? Has it already changed our nation from an historically defensive Athens to an offensive Sparta whose military looks everywhere for trouble and finds it? Who is calculating the cost-to-benefit ratio of sending Green Berets and other Special Operations troopers into remote corners of the world to assassinate suspected terrorists?

Ever since the Vietnam War, our presidents have ushered members of Congress into the grandstand where they can boo or cheer military decisions but not make them, despite what the Constitution says right there in Article 1, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power to provide for the common defense."

While the lawmakers sit in the grandstand and watch his game plan unfold, President Obama is betting on Iraq pacifying itself rather than fighting a civil war; on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new field commander for Afghanistan, and State Department specialists winning Afghan hearts and minds while our troopers and bombers neutralize the Taliban; on Pakistan's shaky government keeping its nukes out of terrorists' hands, and on Russia, China, North Korea and Iran not stirring up the kind of trouble our overextended military would have to deal with. Can any politician, any president, be lucky enough to win all those bets? I doubt it.

Even if Obama should be lucky enough to win all those bets, how much is it going to cost the taxpayers to finance the ongoing wars? Replace the military gear worn out in Iraq? Keep buying those overpriced super weapons the admirals and generals insist they need to fight Russia or China or both? Care for those hundreds of thousands of mentally and physically wounded troopers who fought in this open-ended Global War on Terror?

The short answer is to print more money. Besides adding to the giant deficit, such a step would fuel inflation and perhaps prompt China and other creditor nations to demand that the United States redeem the IOUs they are holding.

Unlike Congress, William Greider, a brilliant writer and analyst, has looked these and other dangers in the eye and told us what he sees around the corner in his new book, "Come Home, America."

He dares to write in the book that America has indeed transformed itself from Athens to Sparta to the point that our unchecked militarism endangers us all. What follows is an excerpt from his chapter entitled "The Next War:"

"The U. S. military, despite its massive firepower and technological brilliance, has itself become the gravest threat to our peace and security. Our risks and vulnerabilities around the world are magnified and multiplied because the American military has shifted from providing national defense to taking the offensive worldwide, from being a vigilant defender to being an adventurous aggressor in search of enemies.
"The predicament this muscle-bound approach puts our country in is dangerous and new," Greider warns. "Go looking for trouble around the world and you are likely to find it. The next war may be a fight that is provoked not by them but by us. The next war may already have started somewhere in the world, perhaps in a small, obscure country that we've never considered threatening."

I agree with Greider that there is a new attack elephant in the American living room. The old watchdog that would bark if some stranger knocked at the door but only bite if he broke into the house has been retired. Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates seem to have fallen in love with Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Marine special operators who do their deadly work in the shadows.

The top of our government was similarly infatuated with special operations during the Vietnam War until some of the operators got out of control and had to be reined in to discourage what was called "cowboyism" back then.

Senators and representatives have put their hands on only part of this new strategy. For example, Senate Armed Services ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., asked McChrystal at his confirmation hearing this important question: "How long do you expect the counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan to last?"

McChrystal replied: "Sir, I can't put a hard date on it. I believe that counter-insurgency takes time. I believe that we need to start making progress within about the next 18 to 24 months." That's a far cry from World War II's bracing "Berlin by Christmas" or "unconditional surrender." Progress will be in the eye of the beholder, as it was during the Vietnam War.

What Congress owes its stockholders, the American people, it seems to me are detailed, annual reports on this Global War on Terror. How inclusive is it? What cost-to-benefit ratios are being applied to proposed operations? Who in Congress would oversee them? Are we creating more problems for ourselves than we're solving? Who is killing whom in the dark and why? Are we in a war without end?

Congress leaped into former President George W. Bush's Global War on Terror before it really looked. But as a nation we have not yet reached the point of no return. There is still time for Congress to get out of the grandstand and dig into this seemingly open-ended war and tell the American people, in public hearings and through commissioned studies, where we are going, why and how much this trip into the unknown is going to cost.

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Foward Observer: Non-exit strategy

George C. Wilson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Voices from the grave make me fear that President Obama and Congress are unwittingly setting up the American military for another Vietnam-type failure in Afghanistan.

"I don't think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don't see any way of winning," President Lyndon Johnson told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in a formerly secret tape-recorded telephone conversation on Feb. 26, 1965 -- since made public.

That president had said while campaigning against Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., in 1964 that "we are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves." At the end of 1964, the United States had 16,300 troops on the ground in South Vietnam. At the end of 1968, this same Lyndon Johnson had sent 536,000 American boys to fight a war in Vietnam that he did not believe he could win.

Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., a thoughtful and far-seeing four star who was deputy commander in Vietnam, wrote in his slim but pithy book, "The Twenty-Five Year War," that "with respect to Vietnam, our leaders should have known that the American people would not stand still for a protracted war of an indeterminate nature with no foreseeable end to the U. S. commitment."

I humped around with troops in the outbacks of South Vietnam in 1968 and 1972 and saw for myself several hard-fighting troopers wearing black armbands to protest the very same war they were in. One of their generals said, "Westy doesn't get it," a reference to Gen. William Westmoreland, America's field commander in Vietnam in 1968, whom critics contended never realized the North Vietnamese leaders would stay in the fight until they won, regardless of how many soldiers our forces killed.

"Your generals are leading you down a primrose path, Mr. President," Clark Clifford, McNamara's successor at the Pentagon, said he told Johnson late in the Vietnam War. Clifford told us editors and reporters at The Washington Post that LBJ had asked him to find out how the United States was really doing in the Vietnam War. Clifford told us that no general would guarantee the president victory no matter how many more troops were sent to Vietnam.

So, as Yogi Berra would put it, Afghanistan looks to me like "deja vu all over again." If I'm right, and I hope I'm not, Obama's decision to put 21,000 more American troops in Afghanistan to bring our total there up to about 59,000 Americans will be followed by our commanders requesting more and more and more military power.

The Vietnam calls to attack enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos may well be echoed as our commanders ask Obama to hit Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.

As in Vietnam, our European friends cannot be counted on to give us significant military help in Afghanistan. Remember, our war in Afghanistan has been going on for almost eight years now. The American public and Congress will eventually demand that Obama either show them light at the end of the tunnel or get the hell out of Dodge.

Obama probably has more time to show progress in Afghanistan than Johnson had in Vietnam. The reason for the longer tolerance is that the mainstream of American society does not have to worry about being drafted to fight a questionable war. The draft, if nothing else, was a national referendum on the rightness of a war America's youth, some from the establishment, were dying in. Not so today. The all-volunteer American military is almost as far out of sight of the American establishment as was the French Foreign Legion to France.

Yet, the patience of the American public and its hired hands in Congress is not unlimited. The more people, especially lawmakers, who read books like Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, the more the American military's mission to pacify the 40,000 tiny villages in Afghanistan will look like mission impossible, especially if our bombings keep killing Afghan civilians and infuriating the ones who survive. Like it or not, fair or unfair, the war in Afghanistan has become Obama's war. The big question is whether Afghanistan will ruin Obama's presidency the way Vietnam ruined Johnson's.

I recently asked the top military officer in our land, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whether he was worried about his civilian bosses setting up the American military for another Vietnam-type failure in Afghanistan. His reply: "I've been given a mission by the president of the United States, and I'm going to succeed in that mission. There are going to be a lot of hard questions" about the American military's role in Afghanistan and its exit strategy, Mullen acknowledged. "I welcome those hard questions. I think we need to be able to answer them. This is a tough fight and it's going to take some time."

In contrast, Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel who served in Iraq and teaches international relations at Boston University, sees another failure coming. "Just as in the 1960s, [when] we possessed neither the wisdom nor the means needed to determine the fate of Southeast Asia," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently, "so, too, today we possess neither the wisdom nor the means necessary to determine the fate of the Greater Middle East."

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Forward Observer: Man On A Mission

George C. Wilson — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

This Memorial Day will find Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C, on a mission to help the thousands of mentally wounded service men and women coming out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is determined to transform a Marine mother's anguish into a safety net for what he sees as a "tidal wave" of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen suffering from invisible wounds inflicted by combat.

"Congressman," wrote Denise Becker in the letter about her son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jeremy Smerud, 27, which launched Jones on his mission, "do you know what it is like to listen to your once-strong son cry like a baby at 3:30 in the morning three or four times a week because he can't handle what he has been through; wanting to kill himself because he doesn't feel he is worthy to live, because his brothers were shot down?

"Do you know what it's like to be 1,500 miles away and not have the ability to help him through this, all the while wondering and asking why the Corps that he served so proudly ... has written him off as worthless and weak and offer no help to prevent him from faltering further?"

Mrs. Becker of Lansing, Iowa, a nurse for 18 years, asked these searing questions of Jones and other officials whom she thought might aid her suffering son. In her view as a health professional, the combat her son went through during three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan had left him with a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

She said he kept trying to block out the demons tearing apart his mind by getting blind drunk. He would call her at all hours of the night to tell her he was about to shoot himself, that he, not his buddy, should have been the one killed in Iraq when they stormed into a house.

The 66-year-old Jones -- whose district includes the Marines' Camp Lejeune -- calls himself "a man of faith" and unashamedly invokes the blessing of God in his speeches on the House floor. He took Becker's letter to heart. He demanded that Marine leaders come to his office and explain why the Corps was not taking better care of the obviously stressed-out Smerud, an Eagle Scout who had never been in trouble in high school.

"The night before the Marine generals came to see me I got down on my knees and prayed to God that his case would touch their hearts," Jones said. His visitors turned out to be Maj. Gen. Michael Regner, legislative assistant to the Marine commandant, and Brig. Gen. James Walker, staff judge advocate. They heard Jones out on March 12, promised to look into Smerud's plight and did.

I read the summary of Smerud's Marine career prepared by Marine Capt. John Diefenbach, his defense counsel for scrapes with the Corps.

The document struck me as one Marine's desperate scream for medical help. Smerud was decorated several times for his performance in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan but kept turning to alcohol to block out his nightmares and other trauma.

A health professional at Lejeune recommended that Smerud be hospitalized for treatment, but the Marine Special Operations Command did not act on the recommendation. He was arrested several times for drunken driving by county cops near Lejeune. On Jan. 13, Pender County, N.C., sentenced the troubled Marine to serve two years for drunken driving and driving without a valid license.

Smerud's Special Operations Command began proceedings to kick him out of the Corps with a less-than-honorable discharge. That would disqualify Smerud from receiving many of the healthcare benefits that his mother believes he will need for the rest of his life.

"That hurt him more than anything," said his mother of the decision to kick him out of the Corps with a less-than-honorable discharge. "I messed up," she said he told her, "but I did my job for them."

The veteran nurse said she sent a certified letter to her son's battalion commander, Lt. Col. Robert Tanzola, asking him 16 pointed questions, including included these: "Why did Jeremy not receive the inpatient treatment that was recommended for him in January, 2008? Why, when the medical professional advised him to be placed in the Wounded Warrior Barracks, [was] the request declined by your command?"

She said her certified letter was sent back to her unopened. I called Tanzola and asked him why he did this. His Special Operations Command, in response to my query, said they could find no record of Tanzola receiving Becker's letter.

Because of Jones' prodding, Marine and state officials have entered the case. They are trying to get Smerud out of jail and into a treatment program at the Portsmouth, Va., naval hospital. Rather than leave it at that, Jones through his spot on the Armed Services Committee, wants to add language to the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill to put a safety net under those suffering from PTSD or traumatic brain injury. Separation boards would have to give active-duty service members with those invisible wounds special consideration while ones already separated with less-than-honorable discharges could appeal those findings before a review board within the Defense secretary's office.

The review board could grant honorable discharges so the veteran would become eligible for government health and other benefits. Such legislation would be hard to oppose. So Jones soon might be able to say, "Mission accomplished."

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Forward Observer: Missile Guidance

George C. Wilson — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Look through the eyes of a seasoned warrior and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and you'll understand why President Obama in this year of recession has a better-than-even chance to convince Congress to slow down the Pentagon's expensive pursuit of the Holy Grail of a perfect missile defense.

Why in this new age where terrorists are the big threat should U.S. leaders continue to do so much worrying and spending to combat the comparatively remote possibility that an outlaw state like North Korea would send a nuclear-tipped missile flying into the American homeland?

This was the question posed to me by Army Gen. Hugh Shelton just before he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2001 and which he is still asking today.

Shelton told me then and now that a terrorist or outlaw state bent on harming our homeland would be far more likely to do something easier like board a sight-seeing boat that circles Manhattan; go out on deck at a propitious moment; pull out the mortar tube hidden under his coat; set it up quickly and "pop off 10 mortar rounds" filled with poison gas, then "throw the mortar tube overboard; go back in the cabin for a drink."

The mortar shells could be timed to explode over the city and spew out poison gas that could kill hundreds and perhaps thousands on the streets below.

Given the recession and crucial money needs of the U.S. military, especially the Army and Marine Corps, which wore out their equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Shelton believes spending so much on an unproved missile defense is a rush to failure.

"Today, as at the beginning of this century, we do not have a proven, effective national missile defense system," Shelton told me last week. "It is embryonic at best and will eventually have to be replaced, upgraded with effective equipment, when available, at great taxpayer expense."

"With today's economic challenges and the growing recapitalization bill facing both the Army and Marine Corps as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan," Shelton continued, "it is time to re-examine the national missile defense program and stop spending exorbitant taxpayer dollars on the fielding of an unproven-ineffective missile defense."

The GAO, in a devastating report issued this month on the nation's missile defense effort, strengthens what Shelton is saying now and what Obama plans to say to Congress.

The new commander in chief intends to urge lawmakers to go along with his cuts in missile defense and "fly before buy" rather than continue to rush little-tested systems to the field. The subtitle of the GAO report will give Obama's fly-before-buy recommendation some lift: "Production and fielding of missile defense components continue with less testing and validation than planned."

GAO's other significant findings in its 104-page report included these: "The Missile Defense Agency has spent about $56 billion and will spend about $50 billion more through 2013 to develop a Ballistic Missile Defense System."

Cost overruns just on individual contracts, not the whole missile defense effort which GAO could not calculate for lack of available figures, are expected to be between $2 billion and $3 billion. "Testing shortfalls have slowed the validation of models and simulations which are needed to assess the system's overall performance. Consequently, the performance of the BMDS as a whole cannot yet be determined."

GAO seems to be saying that even after spending $56 billion on this pursuit of leak-proof missile defenses, with at least another $50 billion to follow, we still don't know whether the United States can stop an incoming bullet with another bullet, with a laser beam, with a flying object or with anything else. At least we knew how to build that bridge to nowhere in Alaska.

Besides the recession, GAO's findings and the coolness of the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps toward spending so much on a future missile defense when they have here-and-now needs like re-equipping their forces and modernizing them, Obama will have another advantage this year as he tries to rationalize missile defense in his image. That is the absence from Congress of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, a long-time defender of the missile defense program from his perch on the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Stevens made sure millions of dollars were spent on missile defense in his home state and defended the program. He lost his bid for re-election last year.

Of course there will be members of Congress who will protest any deep cuts in missile defense. They will contend it would be irresponsible to leave the American people naked against incoming missiles, even though they have been virtually naked against the more likely threat of bombers for decades.

And then there are the jobs that would be lost if missile defense were reduced and restructured. Missile defense contractors have lit back fires against the feared cuts. Several insist they really have invented a better mousetrap this time.

If, despite the favorable political winds, Obama fails to convince Congress to cut missile defense this year and adopt his fly-before-buy approach, there is little hope this new commander in chief can tame the military-industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about in his farewell address in 1961.

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Forward Observer: Obama's Iran Strategy

George C. Wilson — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen agree the administration is better off taking Winston Churchill's advice: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." And Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair says the administration has a bit of breathing room because Iran has not resumed its pursuit of The Bomb.

If diplomacy fails and Iran develops a deliverable nuke, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin believes Russia might be scared into joining the United States in deploying a defense to stop Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles. The wild card is Israel, which has bombed Iraq and Syria to slow their development of The Big One.

Reasoned Levin at his panel's hearing on Iran last week: "A nuclear-armed Iran with ballistic missiles would be a common threat to which Russia cannot be indifferent. U.S.-Russia cooperation on missile defense would send a powerful signal to Iran, perhaps helping dissuade Iran from continuing to violate United Nations resolutions."

As for those Strangelovian Pentagon plans, I was covering the military during the coldest days of the Cold War when one Air Force scheme, Operation Switchblade, was to send a high-altitude plane over China's Lop Nor nuclear facilities, drop a nuclear bomb and then tell the world there had been an accident at the complex.

U.S. government documents recently declassified testify to the fact Obama is just the latest president to anguish over what to do about Iran's nuclear reach. In 1974, when the Shah ruled Iran, a then-classified document warned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that if the Shah was toppled, "domestic dissidents or foreign terrorists might easily be able to seize any special nuclear material stored in Iran for use in bombs."

Just last Wednesday night, Mullen told the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy organization that "I believe Iran is on a path to develop nuclear weapons." The day before he spoke, apprehensive Armed Services senators wrung what they could out of Blair on just how close Iran is to getting nukes.

Levin: "It's my understanding that uranium for civil nuclear power production has to be enriched from 2 to 4 percent, but that highly enriched uranium, which is necessary for a nuclear bomb or warhead, needs to be enriched to about 90 percent. Does the intelligence community believe that as of this time Iran has any highly enriched uranium?"

Blair: "We assess now that Iran does not have any highly enriched uranium."

Levin: "Now, does the intelligence community assess that Iran currently has made the decision to produce highly enriched uranium for a warhead or a bomb?"

Blair: "We assess that Iran has not yet made that decision."

Levin: "And in 2007, that national intelligence estimate on Iran said that, quote: 'The intelligence community judges with high confidence that in the fall of 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.' Is the position of the intelligence community the same as it was back in October of 2007? Has that changed?"

Blair: "The current position of the community is the same, that Iran stopped its nuclear design and weaponization activities in 2003 and has not started them again, at least as of mid-2007."

Levin: "And in 2007, that national intelligence estimate said the following: 'We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date that Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon is late 2009. But that is very unlikely.' Now, if your position is the same as it was in 2007, does the 2009 now become 2011?"

Blair: "Our current estimate is that the minimum time at which Iran could technically produce the amount of highly enriched uranium for a single weapon is 2010-15."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: "A nuclear-armed Iran in terms of destabilizing the Mideast and making the world a more dangerous place, if that event occurred, how would you rate it: 1 being not so much and 10 being very destabilizing?"

Blair: "It'd be up on the 8-to-10 scale."

Graham: "And potentially terrorist organizations might benefit more from that technology? Would that be a concern?"

Blair: "The more nuclear weapons technology around, the greater the chances of it getting into the wrong hands."

Looking through Obama's end of the telescope at Iran's worrisome nuclear technology strides, the options other than diplomacy appear unattractive.

Invading Iran -- like his predecessor invaded Iraq to rid the world of nukes that apparently did not exist -- risks getting our military into another quagmire and spending billions of dollars in the process.

Bombing Iran's nuclear facilities risks poisoning the Earth for decades.

Allowing Iran to pursue The Bomb would likely push Israel into an attack, further inflaming the region.

Talking, bribing or otherwise pressuring Iran out of pursuing nukes thus becomes the least of the unattractive options. And just think, he really wanted this job.

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