Fighting Wars: Gen. David Patraeus

By Alan Caruba

No one can doubt General David Patraeus’s devotion to America and to the U.S. Army in which he served much of his life. In order to take on the position as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency he had to retire, but his vast experience will serve him and the nation well in his new role.

“All In: The Education of General David Patraeus” by Paula Broadwell with Vernon Loeb is part biography and part an analysis of what went right in the Iraq conflict and what went wrong in Afghanistan, now the longest war in U.S. history.

Patraeus was a classic over-achiever, blessed with intelligence, natural leadership skills, and with great mentors as he made his way up the promotion ladder. His devotion to the U.S. Army and America cannot be questioned. A West Point graduate, Patraeus excelled as a student and, in the course of his later assignments, gained an extraordinary knowledge of the world. He was tapped to write the Army’s manual on counter-insurgency warfare.

The success of his methods is credited with turning around the war in Iraq, using the surge of troops that then-President Bush initiated. Iraq was pacified, but as we now know, it is showing signs of breaking apart as rival Sunnis and Shiites return to their ancient conflict for power. Throughout Iran was a covert participant that armed insurgents to kill American combatants.

A key to understanding Patraeus is his devotion to an oath that requires obeying his commander-in-chief’s orders, advising both Bush and Obama candidly behind closed doors, and defending their decisions in public. This is the way all military operate, for good or ill, as regards the outcome of any war.

Ms. Broadwell graduated with honors from West Point who has had considerable access to Patraeus and his colleagues-in-arms. She has had more than a decade in military service and over a decade and a half of work in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency. Her book is a clear-eyed look at the facts about the general and his commands.

One paragraph says a lot about Afghanistan.

“Since the fall of 2009, Afghan forces had grown in size and capability, financed by billions from U.S. taxpayers. In 2010, the Afghan National Army (ANA), the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan Air Force (AAF) grew by some 70,000. By the fall, the ANA stood at just under 145,000 and the ANP just above 113,000; the AAF was just over 4,000. The commitment of funds to this enterprise by the United States and its NATO allies was $11.6 billion in 2011, bringing the total for 2010 and 2011 to about $20 billion. Fourteen percent of Afghan recruits were illiterate, and thousands had gone AWOL…”

A recent Wall Street Journal article about the billions stolen and wasted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program in Afghanistan revealed the futility of winning hearts and minds in a nation operating with a seventh century mentality.

Deep into the book Ms. Broadwell notes that “Patraeus never argued that counter-insurgency was the only way America should fight—only that it was the best way to pursue wars at hand in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

At his retirement ceremony, Patraeus said, “it will be imperative to maintain a force that not only maintains the versatility and flexibility that have been developed over the past decade in particular.”

“I do believe that we have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we are most prepared or most inclined.” He called for “the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.” Full spectrum means being able to fight any conflict anywhere, whether because it was thrust upon us or we chose to engage in it.

The U.S. has engaged in conflicts since 9/11 that could not be won in the traditional definition of “victory” despite the courage and sacrifice of our fighting men and women.

Now, just as in Vietnam and Korea, our forces have either been withdrawn or are now withdrawing from present fields of combat.

We have been fighting stalemates for a long time because the era of full engagement, a world war fought until unconditional surrender, appears to be over. In modern wars, our enemies are thwarted from their goals, but they remain in place to fight again.

The current Islamic battles of an asymmetric war against the West will continue and have even reached our shores on 9/11. Preemption will be necessary and the courage to wage it will be essential.

As often as not, a nation has little choice but to wage war and, despite disappointments regarding the conflicts since 9/11, Iran is daring Israel, the U.S. and the world to challenge its intent to acquire nuclear weapons. Had it not openly declared its intention to destroy Israel, there might be mitigating reasons to withhold action, but there is not.

Following a recent, large amphibious U.S. military exercise, the troops involved are being positioned in anticipation of a new Middle East conflict. This time it will be Iran.

This is occurring, however, as the U.S. military is being systematically hollowed out with major reductions in all its forces; flying aging aircraft, having fewer warships, and, incredibly, anticipating the reduction of eight brigades of the Army.

The President and Congress, busy borrowing billions to pay the enormous national debt imposed by their actions, have weakened the nation’s ability to respond to the next war.

Even so, the nation’s armed forces were and are led by men like Patraeus and the best-educated top- ranked officers this nation has ever had. Until the elections of Presidents Clinton and Obama, they had always been commanded by men who had served their nation in uniform.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

A Short Review of Obama's Agenda

By Alan Caruba

What word describes a President who knowingly and deliberately decreases the nation’s access to energy by stopping an oil pipeline that will not cost the taxpayers a penny and will generate 20,000 jobs?

# Who imposed a moratorium and oil production in the Gulf of Mexico that cost an estimated 12,000 jobs;

# Whose EPA is causing coal-fired plants that provide electricity to shut down;

# Whose administration has put uranium-rich lands off limits to mining to fuel the nuclear plants that represent 20% of the electricity the nation uses?

What word describes a President who knowingly and deliberately plans to cut the Pentagon budget by half a trillion dollars or more in the next decade?

# Who will force the Army to cut as many as eight of its 45 brigades;

# Who has announced that seven of the Navy’s cruisers will be decommissioned sooner than planned;

# Who will leave the Navy with a fleet of fewer than 230 ships if “sequestration” cuts another $500 billion by next January;

# Who appears to believe that the next war can be fought with drones?

The President takes an oath found in the U.S. Constitution that says, “ I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

What if he ignores the Constitutional limits on presidential powers?

Even in matters related to recess appointments, Barack Obama has shown an indifference to the Constitution and has appointed “czars” who largely went unvetted by the U.S. Senate and who presumably have more power to effect policy than the Secretaries of the various executive branch departments.

In March, the Supreme Court will hear a case against Obamacare brought by 28 State’s attorney generals who say that it is unconstitutional.

Whether by reason of intent or stupidity, President Obama is causing this nation to be systematically deprived of sources of energy vital to the economy and the welfare of Americans. He is undermining the ability of the nation to defend itself in the event of an attack and to project force throughout the world to maintain peace in the face of those nations that threaten it.

While declaring himself the protector of the poor and minorities both have become poorer and both have experienced unemployment at rates far higher than any other element of the population.

He has swelled the ranks of those dependent on government handouts. He is the “food stamp President” and he yet may become the “soup kitchen” President if he is reelected.

Americans have lost more wealth since Obama’s inauguration than during the 1930s Great Depression era. Their homes are worth less, their wages have either fallen or stagnated, and they are paying more for all their needs, food, gas, and other necessities.

Having driven the nation’s debt to the highest in its history, doing more in three years than all previous presidents from Washington to Clinton combined, he is now asking Congress to raise the debt ceiling by another $1.5 trillion. He has done this despite the first, historic downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.

He will not be impeached, but he must be defeated.

He is leaving Americans in the dark and unprotected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The 2012 Check List for America's Survival

By Alan Caruba

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.

5. Obamacare must be repealed should the Supreme Court fail to rule that the Commerce Clause takes precedence over its requirement that Americans must purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so.

6. A serious restructuring of Social Security and Medicare must be undertaken. Older Americans who have paid into the system—it is involuntary—must be ensured their benefits will be paid, but younger citizens should have the freedom and responsibility to structure their own retirement and health plans.

7. Access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil should be increased and encouraged. Oil companies should be encouraged to build more refineries via tax credits and removal of “environmental” obstacles.

8. Congress needs to identify and fund the repair to the nation’s aging infrastructure.

9. Utilities should be encouraged via tax credits and other incentives to expand the national “grid” for the distribution of electricity.

10. Term limits for Senators and Representatives should be added to the U.S. Constitution in the same fashion the presidency is limited. Salaries, pensions, and perks should be capped. A permanent political class is a danger to citizens.

11. The Federal government should be downsized with the elimination of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. These powers should be returned to the individual States. (10th Amendment)

12. The nation’s military which has been significantly reduced in size and structure should be expanded with attention to the upgrade and increase of its naval fleet and aircraft.

13. Congress should reject and rescind all legislation based on “global warming” or “climate change” as the former has been demonstrated to be a hoax and the latter is meaningless insofar as the climate is beyond the control of humans.

14. The United States should significantly reduce its contribution to the United Nations and refuse to ratify any of its treaties.

15. Tort reform should be instituted to reduce the costs of health care.

16. The corporate tax rate should be significantly reduced from its present rate, one of the highest in the world, to increase expansion, new jobs, and competitiveness.

17. Public service unions should be illegal. The federal government does not permit such unionization and neither should states.

18. National Public Radio should no longer be funded. The “government entities” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated.

19. The federal government should be restricted or significantly limited from the acquisition of more of the nation’s landmass.

20. Strenuous efforts must be undertaken to reduce the national debt and deficit. A devalued dollar impoverishes everyone.

These are just a few changes which, if implemented, would go a long way to reducing the ills associated with a federal government grown too large, subject to crony capitalism, and corruption.

As John Adams said, "Let us disappoint the men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country."

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Defense-Less

By Alan Caruba

As bad as the present financial crisis is, how much worse would it be if the enemies of the United States of America, emboldened by a smaller Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, decided that they could engage in military aggression against their neighbors with impunity? Or worse.

With time out for conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has played an essential role in maintaining global peace and the safety of the sea lanes. The threat horizon, however, is always changing.

The same week the U.S. was grappling with the aftermath of the Standard and Poor’s downgrade of our credit rating, the Chinese announced they were putting an aircraft carrier, their first, out to sea for its initial trials before further retrofitting. Two others are reportedly being built.

In July, the scholars of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative got together to produce an 8-page report, “Defending Defense: Warning – Hollow Force Ahead!”

They addressed a number of myths about the U.S. armed forces, among which was that they will “continue to enjoy a technological advantage over any and all adversaries”:

“Fact: The Pentagon has nearly skipped a generation of modernization programs while, at the same time, failing to ‘transform’ U.S. forces for the future. The defense budget growth of the past decade was largely on consumables related to current operations. All of the defense cuts over the past two years mortgaged the future to pay for the present.”

“Today’s military flies the same basic planes (e.g., F-15, F-16 and F/A-18 fighters’ B=52, B-1 and B-2 bombers, and a variety of support aircraft) sails the same basic ships (e.g., Trident ballistic missile and Los Angeles-class attack submarines; Aegis-equipped destroyers and cruisers, Nimitz-class aircraft carriers), and employs the same basic ground systems (e.g., Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Black Hawk and Apache helicopters) that it did at the end of the Cold War.”

The former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, twenty years ago!

Frank J. Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy and columnist for The Washington Times, recently warned that “History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, American drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. The post-Vietnam drawdown invited the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and proxy wars for Communist domination from Central America to Angola.”

In an analysis by Commander Bryan Clark, U.S. Navy (Ret) and Dr. Dan Whiteneck, written for the U.S. Naval Institute, the authors noted that, unlike the Reagan years that contributed to the Soviet collapse, “the Navy cannot afford to buy 15 or more ships each year.” Instead it “can afford to buy about ten and half of those are small combatants or support ships. As a result, the Fleet is now at 286 ships, down from 344 in 1998.”

For those who believe the homeland is safe, “the number of ships under way around the United States for homeland defense and training dropped from an average of 60 in 1998 to 20 today.”

Air Force data, as noted above, suggests that the fleet of aircraft being used today is in part an old one. A lot of aircraft will be retired, but the money for newer aircraft is going to be harder to come by. Fewer aircraft of all kinds means that the reach of the USAF will be shorter. It takes a long time to train a fighter or bomber pilot, a maintenance crew, and to provide the logistics to keep what we have airborne. No sensible person wants to contemplate what fighting a modern war would be without air superiority.

In January 2011, Spencer Ackerman reported that the Marines are in the line of budget cuts. “The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is dead. The Marines’ version of the F-35 is on a two-year time-out.”

The U.S. military has been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. Ackerman noted that “The stresses of a decade’s worth of constant deployment have taken their toll on both services (Army and Marine) in myriad ways: measured in suicide rates and post-traumatic stress, family cohesion, and the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Increasing the size of the Army and Marines were (former Secretary of Defense) Gates’ way of mitigating those affects.”

Not only did the raising of the debt ceiling initiate the decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+, a Heritage Foundation scholar, Kim Holmes, noted that the political deal incorporated spending cuts envisioned to be between 6 percent and 7.5 percent “in defense spending from the President’s budget request in February for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, respectively.”

“We will have to sacrifice the future security of all Americans,” said Ms. Holmes, “without actually getting at the cause of the debt crisis—namely, runaway spending on Social Security and other big social entitlements.”

Experts who devote years to studying the nation’s defense budget and realities know it is incredibly complex; far more than a brief look can begin to address. For example, part of the defense budget represents increasing health costs that include not only those injured in combat, but the growing number of retirees. Another part of the problem is the bizarre procurement procedures employed.

Then, too, there are new threats such as cyber-war and, as 9/11 demonstrated, non-state terrorism. What are we to make of the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review that pledged the United States to not respond with nuclear weapons to a biological or chemical attack as long as the attacking nature was in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

There are no easy answers and surely no easy choices, but my guess is that a politically correct military that is now required to accept homosexuals in its midst and will not even publicly identify the Fort Hood killer as a Muslim is in serious trouble, made worse by the reductions in its arsenal of weapons to fight current and future wars.

There will be savings as the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts wind down, but it would be a familiar and dangerous mistake to reduce defense expenditures, a favorite choice of Democrats. History demonstrates this is always unwise.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Hardcore Politically Stupid People

By Alan Caruba

If you harbor the suspicion that a lot of voters are not bright enough to understand the issues, the candidates, or anything about those who hold public office, you are right.

Considering the critical issues affecting the security, economy, and the future of the nation, it is clear that we are being ruled by a cabal in Congress who vote the Democrat Party line without regard for anything other than political self-interest.

They got there, however, because of a solid core of voters who consistently demonstrate what dim bulbs they are.

Assuming some of these morons read the newspaper or got their news from the Internet sites of what is called the mainstream media, a 2004 Pew Research Center poll found that five times more journalists described themselves as politically “liberal” than those who said they were conservative.

That same year, a poll by the University of Connecticut found that journalists backed John Kerry over George W. Bush by a margin of two-to-one. Not much has changed since, except that daily newspapers keep going out of business; more than 120 dailies shut down in 2009.

Journalists keep asking themselves why???

Perhaps slobbering over Barack Obama and getting him elected might have contributed to a general sense of dissatisfaction among people whose I.Q. is higher than room temperature.

For many years there has been an annual Battleground Poll conducted by a bipartisan polling organization known for its rigorous methodology. It seeks to determine how Americans self-identify themselves politically. One of its questions asks, “When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be…” Then the respondent can choose from “very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal, very liberal, or unsure/refused.”

The April 2010 poll results revealed that Americans overwhelmingly describe themselves as conservative. Over the years the percentage has never been less than 58% and, over the course of the years, 60.2% on average call themselves conservative.

This raises the question, of course, why the Congress is filled with so many “progressives” or “liberals”, depending what they call themselves or why Ronald Reagan’s two terms and George H.W. Bush’s single term was followed by William Jefferson Clinton? He, in turn, was followed by George Walker Bush. Voters then turned to a completely unknown candidate with no experience beyond having been a “community organizer”, Barack Hussein Obama.

Nothing resembling logic explains this, but there is a factor that stands out in poll after poll and that is raging stupidity.

A casual look at poll results in just the past month gives evidence of this. For example, despite the greatest man-made disaster of recent times, the BP oil spill, Rasmussen Reports revealed that 25% of adults nationwide had a favorable opinion of BP. Indeed, 6% had a “very favorable” opinion of BP.

Rasmussen polls asking for opinions of Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, revealed that 32% had a “somewhat favorable” opinion of this pinhead and 21% had no opinion regarding her performance in office.

Asked about Attorney General Eric Holder, one in four voters (26%) “still don’t know enough about Holder to venture any kind of opinion about him” and 35% professed to hold a favorable view. This is the AG who criticized the Arizona illegal immigration statute without having read it.

Ignorant of U.S. history and our Constitution, 28% of those polled said that civilian control of the military is bad for the U.S. The Founding Fathers, including James Madison, the chief author of the U.S. Constitution, advocated civilian control to ensure a stable democracy.

Finally, for my purposes, there are the polling results regarding whether the nation is on the right or wrong track these days. As recently as late June 28% of likely voters said that the country is heading in the right direction!

We have a Congress voting on bills, often in excess of two thousand pages, without knowing what they entail or the changes they will impose.

We have a President who has taken barely a year and a half to double the national debt, crisscrossed the world to apologize for protecting huge portions of it from despotism, has nationalized one sixth of the economy with a hated healthcare act and is pushing for a Cap-and-Trade bill that will impose crushing taxes on all energy use. He also intends to raise our income taxes in the midst of a raging Recession.

You don’t have to be a statistician to figure out that somewhere between 25% and 30% of the voters are stupid beyond redemption, oblivious to events and trends that show a nation in deep trouble.

I suggest this is the core constituency of the Democrat Party that has been pandered to from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The remainder, the 60.2% who identify themselves as conservatives had better get to the polls in November to save this nation from utter ruin.

© Alan Caruba, 2010