When Johnny comes marching home (vets and homelessness)

Associated press is running a story through Yahoo which notes that "Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population"[1] This has been a problem for American society in all of its major military engagements.

Most alarming from this report is the trend. Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with locating employment. Given the long rotation times and short leave times of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts, Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa sums up the coming trend: "We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous."[1]

This is not good news for American society. However, I think there is a bright spot. Traditionally, the Democratic party robustly supports funding for mental health and related social services,[2] and it looks like they are going to take control of the government for awhile, so we might get the opportunity to substantially lessen this problem before it becomes critical.



REFERENCES

[1] "Study: 1 out of 4 homeless are veterans" Yahoo News (Accessed November 7, 2007).

[2] "Democrats Working to Expand Veterans Mental Health Care" The Democratic Party Website (Accessed November 7, 2007).

O.

U.S. govt. preparing to screw tomorrow's college students: the sequel

There is a lot of talk in the last few weeks about the possibility of the U.S. bombing Iran. I think such an action, if indeed it ends up being a military action, might finally be the tip-off to college age young people that their future is once again being screwed by a particularly virulent association of morons (i.e. neo-conservatives) in the U.S. executive branch. Students might want to review what is their constitutional right to protest while in school. I just don't relish the thought of stepping into class and pondering what my professorial peers must have in the 1960s: "Here is Americas best; here is America's fodder. These are the sacrificial lambs for people too stupid to realize how to engage in constructive international diplomacy." Call me crazy, but I'm thinking that might lower job my satisfaction as a professor.

Dr Michael McKinley, a senior lecturer in International Relations and Strategy at the Australian National University, says a US attack on Iran, even a so-called "surgical" strike, would lead to war.

"If the United States was to engage in surgical strikes, as some people are once again talking about, you would have to say that Iran could very well behave in such a way, and there'd be a broad scope of possibilities here, where a widely escalated war would need to ensue after that, because I cannot imagine that Iran would just allow itself to be attacked without taking some sort of forceful reaction."[1]

But if we are in Iraq when this happens, and if we still maintain the full commitment of troop strength in order to keep Iraq stable, then where would the new manpower come from when Iran decides to get hostile? Why, the selective service database, of course; in other words, some sort of draft would ensue.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has been writing about the possibility of a US strike on Iran for the past 18 months, and he has noted a change in rhetorical strategy coming out of the Bush administration:

"The name of the game used to be that they're a nuclear threat, Iran is going to have a bomb soon, we have to do it, sort of the same game we had before the war in Iraq. What's happened is that in that last few months they've come to the realization that's it's not selling, the American people aren't worried about Iran as a nuclear threat, certainly as they were about Iraq, there's just some skepticism. So they've switched, really. Instead of trying to sell it, not only to the American people but to its allies, the notion of a massive bombing against the infrastructure, what they call counter-proliferation against the infrastructure of the Iraqi bomb, hitting the various facilities that we know exist - instead, they've now decided that they're going to hit the Iranians, payback for hitting us."[1]

How convenient that Iran is meddling in Iraq. Or somebody from Iran. Or maybe a portion of the Iranian military not directly affiliated with government policy. I am very suspicious of the logic which runs as follows: since the munitions used in Iraq are manufactured in Iran, the Iranian government is directly involved in undermining the US mission in Iraq. Therefore, the sole US option is to attack Iran. The last time, I fell for such parlor tricks as justification for attacking Iraq. But now I am raising the bar of evidence much higher before I buy in, for I know we have both unintelligent and irresponsible leadership in the executive branch.


O.

Note: I am not a Democrat. I am a veteran.

REFERENCES


[1] Barney Porter "Bush steps up anti-Iran rhetoric" ABC News October 1, 2007. (Accessed October 1, 2007)

Army generation gap causing increasing officer tensions

{ Podcast this essay } In a recent NY times article, there was an extended treatment about how elite junior officers in the U.S. Army are starting to challenge the Army generals on Iraq strategy and policy. This tension is interesting to me; because, in my experience, there is seemingly a significant change in the outlook of college-age people about every seven years or so. And many of these junior officers are of approximately the same age group.

My speculation is that Junior High school-age young people track what Senior High school-age young people are doing, but after about six-years (two years J.H. + four years S.H.) there is a cultural turn-over. In a similar window of cultural change, we are now approximately seven years into the Iraq conflict as we now know it (and even longer if you count the Kuwait pre-cursor activities to it all). And as I mentioned, junior grade officers are very close to college age, typically representing the age group of graduate students. So where arises the tension?

Since those in senior strategic military command positions (i.e. Generals) have been culturally (or actively) formed by combat experiences from the late 1960s, or by cold war maneuverings from the 1970s and 1980s, they appear from the perspectives of junior grade officers (lieutenants, captains, majors) to be improperly understanding, or to be unwilling to change, the circumstances of the military's engagement in Iraq. In the NY times article, Fred Kaplin comments on the differences between the two groups:

Today’s generals rose through the officer corps of the peacetime Army. Many of them fought in the last years of Vietnam, and some fought in the gulf war. But to the extent they have combat experience, it has been mainly tactical, not strategic. They know how to secure an objective on a battlefield, how to coordinate firepower and maneuver. But they don’t necessarily know how to deal with an enemy that’s flexible, with a scenario that has not been rehearsed.

This disagreement about how Iraq is going which is voiced by many of the best junior grade officers who have actually done tours in Iraq, who have formed opinions drawn from their own intense exposure to that theater, is probably fueled in part by differences in how the younger generation evaluates "success" in military action. The senior grade officers have not been explicitly trained to deal with the odd circumstances wherein the U.S. finds itself, and the junior grade officers are noting the implications of their senior officer's confusion on the matter -- i.e., at the combat and operations level. Eventually, it seems even the generals themselves admit the problems, but this just exasperates the junior officers further. Another quote from Kaplin:

[In April of 2006] six retired Army and Marine generals publicly criticized Rumsfeld, who was still the secretary of defense, for sending too few troops to Iraq. Many junior and field-grade officers reacted with puzzlement or disgust. Their common question: Where were these generals when they still wore the uniform? Why didn’t they speak up when their words might have counted?

One can easily summarize the junior officers' attitude about such admissions: too little, too late.

That the younger generation is reassessing the U.S.'s military role can also be seen elsewhere. Trends of attendees at West Point are showing a clear trend of change in attitude. Potential officer recruits are exiting at a much higher rate:

West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force: memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.

That 44 percent decided it was not in their interest or ultimate values to support American military policy in Iraq, or in the greater world more generally, is a telling statistic. Again, this is all occurring at West Point, where young people enter that premiere institution already friendly to the idea of being a military officer, already probably primed to pursue that track, but their academic and social experiences eventually move 44 percent to outright change their mind. I would also suspect that a significant fraction of the remaining 56 percent who went on to active duty were not exactly enamored with their future career possibilities.

In the end, I note two more quotes from the NY Times article, ones which are so representative of ambiguities in U.S. military history that one is left wondering if the awareness of history, even in excruciating detail can make any difference at all to American political policy. First, there is the role that senior officers should play (or should not play) in a constitutional republic where civilians decide military policy:

The very discussion of these issues discomforts many senior officers because they take very seriously the principle of civilian control. They believe it is not their place to challenge the president or his duly appointed secretary of defense, certainly not in public, especially not in wartime. The ethical codes are ambiguous on how firmly an officer can press an argument without crossing the line. So, many generals prefer to keep a substantial distance from that line — to keep the prospect of a constitutional crisis from even remotely arising.

Second, this upper-echelon cultural hesitancy of pressing arguments against risky (or even stupid) use of military policy can create situations that eventually take on a life of their own, situations that have no option of solution, but only of cessation. In 1982, Wass de Czege was ordered to rewrite the Army’s field manual on combat operations, and in doing so incorporated many of the lessons of classic treatises on war, from both Eastern and Western sources, and from his own experiences from Vietnam. A quote from him leaves one wondering if the U.S. simply has the same problem, but with a different geography:

In an essay for the July issue of Army magazine, Wass de Czege wrote that today’s junior officers “feel they have much relevant experience [that] those senior to them lack,” yet the senior officers “have not listened to them.” These junior officers, he added, remind him of his own generation of captains, who held the same view during and just after Vietnam

Once Rumsfeld said that the Iraq situation was not like Vietnam. "Different Place. Different time." He stridently said to the press. He was right, but I think history will add a third phrase: "Same mistake."


REFERENCES

Fred Kaplin, "Challenging the Generals" NY Times (Accessed 8/27/2007)

O.

Contemplating the first, deadly strike

{ Podcast this essay } The discipline of emptying the mind, just before the strike, demands either superb mental control, gained by years of practice; or, it requires merely a very small brain, one that lies empty, devoid of all but the most metabolic of thoughts, one trained to kill without even the distraction of remorse.

[image] Samuel Yung photos.

O.

The Professional Soldier (mash-up comics)

Click the above image for full size.

The purpose and character of the use of comix herein is for nonprofit, educational purposes, as subject to limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the Copyright Act (title 17, U. S. Code). Character likenesses adapted from http://cobb.typepad.com

O.

US Military challenges in Iraq and robotic aircraft development

{ Audio this essay @ 7min @ 1.59MB } Two excellent articles on military analysis have appeared in Slate magazine in the last few days.

The first one is titled, "Broken Arrow: How the U.S. Army broke in Iraq" by Phillip Carter

Here is a quote:

Four years into the war, the Army still has too few troops to persevere in Iraq and Afghanistan and too few deployed in each place to win. To surge its forces in Iraq, the Army has dipped deep into its well, returning units back to combat after less than a year at home, leaving many with little time to train incoming soldiers and come together as a team. Of all the signs of breakage, perhaps the most acute is the decision to redeploy Army brigades to Iraq sooner and for longer tours in combat. The entire active-duty force is either deployed, set to deploy soon, or within one year of coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan. Short of conscripting millions of Americans to rapidly build a larger military, contracting out for a larger force, or mobilizing the entire reserves at once, military leaders say they have no other choice—to surge in Iraq, they must reduce the time soldiers spend at home between deployments and lengthen their combat tours from 12 to 16 or 18 months. But sending troops to Iraq after such a short time to reorganize, refit, and retrain is a recipe for disaster.[1]

The second one is titled, "B-52, Where Are You? Why the Pentagon doesn't want you to know its bombers finally work" by Gregg Easterbrook

And a quote from that one:

The withering away of the bomber corps reflects planning assumptions a quarter-century old. Then, the thinking was that precision-guided munitions delivered from low altitude by jet fighters would take over nearly all conventional bombing roles. As recently as a few months before 9/11, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the mothballing of 30 B-1 bombers on the theory that they'd never be used in a modern, fighter-dominated air war anyway. Pentagon planners assumed that bombers would play a secondary role while low-flying fighters put the smart explosives on the target. Instead, unexpected technical breakthroughs resulted in extremely accurate munitions that can be dropped from high altitude by bombers, at less cost and risk than using low-flying fighters. The result has been that during the Afghanistan and second Iraq campaigns, most of the air punch has been delivered by a handful of the remaining bombers. Some 80 percent of the bombs dropped during the U.S. seizure of Afghanistan fell from bombers; the share dropped on Iraq since March 2003 is nearly as high. Though bombers have in this decade turned out to be far more important to U.S. military action than Pentagon strategists expected, the government still plans to invest fantastic amounts of money in fighter planes that would be used mainly to drop bombs.[2]

What makes these articles nice "book ends" to one another is that one covers issues in ground military power, while the other covers issues in air military power.

In the end, I think problems identified in both articles will be somewhat alleviated by robotic aircraft, both of the tactical variety[3] and of the strategic variety.[4] However, there seems to be two general problems with robotic aircraft.

First, it appears that they threaten a certain mystique of pilot culture, a culture which is reinforced by the standard profile of a fighter pilot and by society at large. Psychologists have observed that first-born children form a statistically significant proportion of fighter pilots. There have been many reasons cited for this. First borns tend to be more successful, and the very occupation of fighter pilot is highly prized in greater society. Also, older siblings have higher self esteem, confidence in social interactions, and proclivities toward leadership roles.[5] Since there are many individuals already in the profession who both prize and influence the values of fighter pilot culture, and since society itself prizes (and socially rewards) the job of fighter pilot, it is no surprise that a shift to robotic aircraft has not inspired those within (and even outside of) combat aircraft culture. Note, however, that predictors for a person becoming a pilot and predictors for the performance of a pilot are not the same: "Reviews of the research literature have generally concluded that personality factors contribute little to pilot performance."[6]

Second, the appearance of robotic aircraft make the current financial commitments towards advanced, manned fighter programs seem extravagant, perhaps even unnecessary. Naturally, there are people in the Air Force who want to deny this:

Col. Christopher Jella is the commander of the 18th Reconnaissance Squadron, the newest Global Hawk unit. From Beale Air Force Base in California, Jella oversees pilots and sensor operators who control 120-foot-wingspan reconnaissance drones that are launched from forward locations in Southwest Asia. “I think a lot of the mysticism with UAVs [i.e., Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] comes with the fact that we’ve lumped them all into this UAV [rubric],” Jella said. “Remember, back in 1920, you had this thing called an ‘airplane’, and you had the same problem.“What we now call UAVs represent so many diverse aircraft performing such diverse missions that it’s pointless to generalize about them — and pointless to compare them to manned aircraft,” Jella said. What’s more, he adds, the Air Force should be interested in “effects,” not specific hardware.[4]

Colonel Jella's position that it's pointless to generalize and compare robotic aircraft to manned aircraft is in error. There is indeed a very general and straightforward rebuttal to such thinking: when robotic aircraft are destroyed in combat, somebody temporarily loses some money; but, when when manned aircraft are destroyed in combat, somebody loses a husband and/or a parent. Sorry Colonel--I hardly find that generalization about robotic aircraft pointless.


REFERENCES

[1] "Broken Arrow: How the U.S. Army broke in Iraq." Slate Magazine Online (March 2007)

[2] "B-52, Where Are You?: Why the Pentagon doesn't want you to know its bombers finally work." Slate Magazine Online (April 2007)

[3] Frank Colucci "Army Developing Tactics for Armed Robotic Aircraft" National Defense (April 2005)

[4] By David Axe August 2006 "Clouds on the horizon for pilot-less bombers" National Defense (August 2006)

[5] Tenney, Rogers, and Pew, 1988; Gras, Moricot, and Poirot-Delpech, 1989; Rogers, Tenney, and Pew, 1991; Sarter (1991); Woods and Sarter (1992); Madigan and D.Tsang, 1992; Sherman, Helmreich, Smith, Wiener, and Merritt, 1992; Sherman, 1995.

[6] Siem & Murray "Personality factors affecting pilot combat performance: a preliminary investigation." Aviation, space, and environmental medicine 1994 May;65(5 Suppl):A45-8.

O.

Disclosure: I was in the Air Force in the early 1980s, and in the Army National Guard in the late 1980s.

Conscientious Rejector Officer: 1st Lt. Ehren Watada

A very interesting article/interview has appeared as a special feature over at Yahoo News.[1] This kind of military ethics discussion often happened during the Vietnam war, but this junior officer gives a nuanced apologetic of his position. He is clearly an educated and articulate person (and hardly a coward, as many are cat-calling him). Here's the opening paragraph or two of the piece:

First Lt. Ehren Watada, a 28-year-old Hawaii native, is the first commissioned officer in the U.S. to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq. He announced last June his decision not to deploy on the grounds the war is illegal. Lt. Watada was based at Fort Lewis, Washington, with the Army's 3rd (Stryker) Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. He has remained on base, thus avoiding charges of desertion. He does, however, face one count of "missing troop movement" and four counts of "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." If convicted, he faces up to six years in prison.[1]

On Mr. Watada's view, the issue seems to rotate around whether he has been issued a legal order. Here is a selection from the interview where he gives a synopsis of his position:

I'm trying to end something that is criminal, something that should not have been started in the first place and something that is making America less safe — and that is the Iraq war. By just going there and being willing to participate, and doing my job, or whatever I'm told to do — which actually exacerbates the situation and makes it worse — I would not be serving the best interest of this country, nor the soldiers that I'm serving with. What I'm trying to do is end something, as I said, that's illegal, and immoral, so that all the soldiers can come home and this tragedy can come to an end. It seems like people and critics make this distinction between an order to deploy and any other order, as if the order to deploy is just something that's beyond any other order. Orders have to be determined on whether they're legal or not. And if the order to deploy to a war that is unlawful, if that is given, then that order itself is unlawful.

This is not as tidy as he'd like us to have it. As a thought experiment, if an officer was issued an order to slay unarmed, non-hostile civilians, then an officer would be right to refuse it on legal grounds, since it is indeed illegal to slay unarmed, non-hostile civilians. But this is not the issue in Mr. Watada's case.

Since there is no world supreme court or world law, how can Mr. Watada say that the war in Iraq is "legal" or not? I don't think the issue of legality ever gets started. The Iraq war might have begun because of immoral actions, but the soldier's duty is to follow legal orders, and the order to deploy to geographic area X (Iraq or anywhere else) is certainly a legal one.

The soldier might deplore The President's policy which motivated (and motivates) the use of the military, but an officer at Mr. Watada's level is not a policy determining soldier. The Joint Chiefs of Staff could appropriately make such an argument, but they have not; thus, Mr. Watada should not.

In conclusion, Mr. Watada is confused about what his role is at the level which he participates (i.e. at the level of junior officer). I can appreciate his moral revulsion at participating in the Iraq war, but he should have carefully investigated what was his duty as a soldier before he signed. This is one of the more important lessons in military ethics gleaned from the Vietnam War. (Disclaimer: I'm a veteran of both the Air Force and the Army.)

REFERENCES

[1] "Conscientious Rejector?" Yahoo News (Accessed 1/04/07)

[also] You Tube speech by Watada. (Accessed 1/04/07)

.O.