Gates And The Future Of The American Army

Robert Gates has a long and distinguished record of saying unpleasant things which need to be said.  He did it again today in remarks at West Point delivered to the Corps of Cadets.  Among his ruminations on the future of the US army were his view that the US should not again fight a ground force heavy intervention of the Iraq or Afghan sort anywhere in Asia, Africa, or the Mideast.  He also and correctly noted the army will have to change its culture regarding career development or run the risk of losing its best junior and mid-rank officers to the tedium of clerical and budgetary work.

His view of our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan merit close study  While he refrained from offering any direct criticism of the decisions leading to either war, his cautionary not to say pessimistic thought about any future repetition give a strong hint as to how he would have done the job had he been in the Pentagon back in 2001-3.

It is important to understand that Dr Gates did not retreat behind an update of the preposterous refrain of so many decades, "No more Vietnams!"  Rather he implied that the US may find it necessary to intervene in failed or failing states, or states which offer cover and comfort to hostile non-state actors, but any such future operations must not be massive exercises in regime change and nation building.  In his understanding, interventions must be of (to use an archaic but respectable term,) "punitive."  These would be conducted primarily by air and naval assets but of necessity would include specialist ground formations tasked with the neutralization or capture of designated personnel or facilities.

Interventionary operations, if the Geek is understanding the tenor of Gates' position correctly, would be short, sharp, well-defined as to goals but would leave the larger political questions up to some entity other than the US military.  Certainly, this is how it should have been in Afghanistan.  The military should have been focused simply on destroying al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime.  Much of this could have been undertaken successfully by air assets, but the use of ground formations would still have been necessary.  With the evolution of remotely operated aerial vehicles, this sort of operation could be conducted more efficiently now or in the future than it could have been a decade ago, but even so specialist ground troops will remain essential in the years to come.

The prime concept governing interventionary operations must be a combination of economy of force and economy of time.  The job must be done swiftly and with the lowest possible investment in the "men-at-risk" category.  Since political, social, and economic reconstruction and reform are both lengthy in duration and intensive in human capital requirements, this area of task must remain beyond the competence of the military.

It is legitimate to infer from Dr Gates' words that the best adventure in regime change is the one which is undertaken using indirect means.  This implies little if any role for the military particularly the ground forces.  The Gates view is historically justified.  The only sort of regime change which will work is one which is conducted by the locals, one which arises organically from legitimate political disaffiliation on the part of a segment of the population.  Indeed, that is an operational definition of insurgency.  The outsider may play indirect roles in applying pressure to the status quo regime and support to the dissidents, but must not go any further.

Dr Gates stated categorically that the army will have its hands full justifying the expense of maintaining its heavy formations.  With this proposition, the Geek disagrees.  The threats confronting American national interests are not confined to those of failed, failing, hollow, or captive states or the non-state actors which flourish in those soils.  The threats also include large, complexly organized, technologically advanced states with ambitions which will run counter to the interests of the US, its allies, and clients.  The two top candidates on this list are China and Russia.

Again, the primary tools of deterrence and the war fighting on which deterrence is based are air and naval in nature.  But the utility of heavy ground formations in this area where diplomacy and war intersect cannot and must not be minimized.  The hoary question attributed to Joe Stalin when told the Pope was opposed to some Soviet initiative, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" applies to the Men in the Kremlin and the Trolls of Beijing today and into the foreseeable future.

The credible capacity to coerce which includes the credible capacity to deter is based on the perception that a country possesses both the means and the will to wage war effectively.  As the nuclear deterrent slides down in direct relevance, the metric of war fighting will rest increasingly on conventional air, naval, and ground forces.  In the latter category the primary index will be the size, number, and perceived competence of heavy formations.

The essential task confronting both the Army and Marine Corps in the era of the Incredible Shrinking Budget will be that of maintaining a credible capacity to fight both interventionary and conventional inter-state wars.  This may require some very creative out-of-the-box thinking on the part of both services with the final result being some sort of division of tasks with the heavy, conventional conflict duty accruing primarily if not exclusively to the Army.  Admittedly, the notion of preparing for the least likely of wars is frustrating to those who spend entire careers doing so, but boredom is the price of deterrence.

The fundamental nature of war is essentially unchanged and unchangeable, but the devil now and into the future resides in the details.  The world is not on the verge of universal peace and long term stability.  Governments such as those in Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela show this as do events in the Mideast.  Russia has announced an enormous military redevelopment program which will see a quantum level improvement in the materiel basis of the Russian military forces over the next decade.  The Chinese show no indication of abandoning their drive for a military second to none across the board: air, sea, ground, cyber, and space.

Nor is there any use appealing to the fiction on the banks of the Hudson river.  The UN has unlimited ambitions but no real capacity in its primary, arguably only, reason for existence--keeping and enforcing the international peace.  Similarly, there is no joy in the position so often adopted by the self-appointed academic, media, and political elites in Western Europe and the US, the notion that nationalism and the nation-state are dead or rapidly dying.

The reality remains that the US will continue to have national and strategic interests which will need to be defended against the hostility of other states.  Another reality will continue: There are states and non-state actors who are hostile to the US--regardless of who is occupying the Oval this year.  So will a third reality: the US must look first and foremost to itself in pursuing and defending its national and strategic interests.  Then, of course, there is the inconvenient fact that the US remains a Great Power, not as great a Great Power as just a very few years ago but a Great Power nonetheless.  This is a status that cannot be surrendered; it can only be lost or taken away by the acts of others.

This means the US will have to fight more interventionary conflicts.  It means the US must be able to show each and every day for years to come that it has both the means and will to fight a high intensity war against a peer.  This means that the US Army and other services will still have a job and We the People must be both able and willing to pay the associated costs.

The alternative remains what it always has been: A curtailment of American freedom to act on the global stage, and, when night falls, surrender to the forces of fear and hate.

What Kind Of War Will We Be Fighting?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for an evaluation of the role, mission, and configuration of the Marine Corps. At roughly the same time he suggested the Navy needed to reconsider its needs and, presumably, its role in future wars. While being less direct (in recent weeks) regarding both Army and Air Force, the soon to be outgoing SecDef has clearly questioned the current postures and mission orientation of both services.

The subtext of Dr Gates' push to reconfiguration consists of two questions. What kind(s) of war will the US be fighting in the next couple of decades? What is the current and projected state of play regarding the relative supremacy of offense and defense?

No aspect of human endeavor better fits the Hegelian dialectic then does the relation of offense and defense in warfare. Every new thesis of offense calls an antithesis of defense into existence. And, the new defense summons a synthesis of offense. So the wheel turns.

The celebration of the defense got a boost recently with the widespread and breathless discussion of the new Chinese wonder weapon, a highly accurate anti-ship ballistic missile. The couch potato admirals, not all of whom were Chinese, gleefully decided the new, untested missile would make US naval force projection utterly impossible within a thousand klicks or so of the Chinese landmass.

Any number of pundits who have never heard a shot fired in anger weighed in with a pornographically precise description of just how the new system would neutralize the Nimitz class carriers should any make so bold as to come over to the Chinese half of the Pacific Ocean. The first incoming conventional warhead would "kill" the Nimitz class as a weapons system by wrecking its capacity for air operations. The second would nail the ship's propulsive system turning the monumentally expensive and complex ship into a umpteen thousand ton hulk. Then, missile number three would speedily dispatch the hulk to Davy Jones' locker.

Badda-bing! That's all she wrote. End of the US as the number one maritime power. Might as well surrender to the Trolls of Beijing now and avoid the mess later.

Of course this dystopian view depends upon a number of assumptions--all of them quite questionable.

The first is that the US Navy knows utterly nothing about how to play hide-and-seek in the vast expanses of the ocean. Next, the it's-all-over-with crowd seems to believe that there is no way the US could possibly exploit any of the numerous opportunities to perturb, spoof, spiel, or otherwise degrade the extensive C4ISR system(s) which would be required to support the missile. Finally, the proponents of imminent American naval defeat ignore the demonstrated ABM and ASAT capacities of the Aegis supported Standard missile as well as the improvement curve expected over the next few years.

(Oh, yes, they also failed to note the status of directed energy weapon research, development, and deployment as if that is somehow less relevant than the still far from IOC ready Chinese ship-killer.)

The saga of the Chinese super-weapon or at least its portrayal in assorted American and foreign media should be seen as an excellent illustration of an important ground truth. The Hegelian dialectic, the yin and yang of offense and defense is never a finished process. It is always the big wheel that keeps on moving.

The same is true with respect to amphibious forcible entry. In his assessment of the Marine Corps need for a review of its main missions, Dr Gates contended that the days of storming the beach were over. The secretary averred improvements in anti-ship missile technology assured that an invasion force would have to "away all boats" forty or more miles offshore. This, of course, was an order of magnitude greater distance than required during WW II or, sixty years ago next month, the last great amphibious operation in US history, the one at Inchon, Korea.

To Dr Gates the takeaway was self-evident. The distance, and the time required to transit it would be too great. In the future, large scale operations across a contested beach would be impossible at any acceptable loss rate.

Surely with his vast experience, Dr Gates knows better. He has both seen enough and, in all probability, studied enough to understand that there is no such critter as a stasis imposed by the unconquerable defense or the irresistible offense.

Being a contemporary of the Geek, the secretary must recall, for example, the confident expressions by experts of high rank and great experience of a belief that the helicopter was too slow, too low flying, too fragile to survive in a combat zone. He should remember the pronouncements to the effect that the Marine's doctrine of "vertical envelopment" would prove impossible at any acceptable loss rate.

The experts were wrong as battlefields from Vietnam to Afghanistan have shown. The great wheel of offense versus defense rolled on. Improvements in one drove improvements in the other. There is no reason to believe this dynamic will suddenly and abruptly change.

History is filled with other examples, very well known examples. The combination of artillery, machine guns, field fortifications, and barbed wire made ground offensives impossible. Sure, until the armored fighting vehicles were developed. The battleship was supreme. Sure, until the airplane and submarine proved otherwise.

Submarines were queens of the sea. You bet. Until effective technologies of detection and engagement were developed. The bomber would get through. Yes, until radar, controlled figher interception, and surface to air missiles arrived on the scene.

Technological lurches in and off themselves are not necessary and sufficient reasons to demand a review and reconfiguration of missions and mission postures. The only truly necessary and sufficient reason for this to occur is found in the nature of the wars most likely to be fought in the next few years, say the next couple of decades.

Way back when, well, at least before 9/11, a faculty member at the National War College challenged the Geek to make one of his (in)famous "fearless predictions." The Geek obliged, opining that the most probable type of war for the US over the next generation or two would be that of an interventionary nature. The kind of war now called "overseas contingency operations."

While the probability of a peer-to-peer conflict with, say, China could not be ruled zero, such was diminishingly small. Rather it was likely to highly likely that the US would find it necessary to involve itself in messy little, frustratingly inconclusive interventions ranging from the punitive to the humanitarian to the stability enhancing to the counterinsurgent. Nasty little wars of policy which would be critical to national and strategic interests but not in themselves existential or total.

To date the prediction has been borne out. Further, there is no reason to see the situation altering in any fundamental fashion for the next two decades. Not even an attack on Iran would result in a total war of national survival for the US. The probability of a peer-to-peer mid- to high-intensity war with China or Russia is no more probable today than it was fifteen years ago. Nor, absent some form of unilateral disarmament is such going to loom larger in the real world over the next two decades.

This global reality does demand a more effective configuration of American forces: Marines, Navy, Army and Air Force. The necessity and desirability of such a reconfiguration has gained greater salience from the experiences of the past ten years. Further stimulus comes from the only partially acknowledged fact that the advocates of violent political Islam have not lost their appetite for armed confrontation with the US and other civilized states nor their ability for horizontal escalation.

The Marine Corps can be employed as an example of the necessary reconfiguration of doctrine, force structure, and posture. It should be recognized that the Marines are quite unlikely to be engaging in amphibious forcible entries in the next few years. This assertion is based not on changes in anti-ship missile technology or the increasing availability of inexpensive, effective anti-ship missiles but rather on the nature of likely wars.

In this context it is necessary to remember that the Marine Corps has a wide, extensive, and highly successful experience with interventionary operations, particularly counterinsurgency. For most of the past one hundred years, the Marines have been more often employed in low intensity interventionary operations than in assaulting heavily defended beaches. To put it in perspective, the USMC spent less than three years seizing beaches during WW II and Korea while Marines fought for six years in South Vietnam and nearly that long in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as in the earlier "Banana Wars" of the Twenties and Thirties, the Marine Corps demonstrated the value of its tightly disciplined, flexible, down and forward approach to leadership in counterinsurgency. In all these deployments the Marines demonstrated a very rapid learning curve, a high degree of innovation, and a genuine competence at working with indigenous forces. The Marines have often exasperated higher command with their independence ("hell, the Marines are fighting their own war out there,"), but none have questioned their effectiveness.

In other interventionary operations, the Marine Corps' combination of high discipline, unit coherence, and integrated air and ground capabilities provided the necessary combination of lethality and restraint to accomplish difficult missions. (In this context it is helpful to remember the Marine operation in Lebanon in 1957.)

Had a Marine force been tasked with the neutralization of Somalian warlords in 1993, there would have been no possibility of the mission destroying "Blackhawk down" debacle. The very nature of Marine force posture and doctrine would have prevented the mounting of such a poorly planned and inadequately supported operation as that undertaken by Special Forces personnel at that time. (All that is necessary to keep in mind is that the Marines have organic armor, rotary wing and fixed wing as well as the necessary integrated command, control, and communication capabilities.)

In short, the Marine Corps brings to the table all the features and capacities necessary for short, sharp, constrained lethality operations. For humanitarian relief operations when risk of armed opposition exists, (bare in mind that Pakistani Taliban has threatened attack on relief personnel during the current flood) or a punitive expedition (such as the invasion of Afghanistan should have been) or stability enhancement deployments such as Lebanon in 1957 (or, absent the critical mistakes of mission definition and rules of engagement, Lebanon in 1982), the Marine Corps should be the lead force.

True, leaning on the Corps would violate the totem of "jointness" which has ruled supreme for the past several decades. If Dr Gates is serious he should kick start a review on "joint and combined operations" with a goal of eliminating those which are not genuinely required by the nature of the operation. He knows, (it is flatly impossible that he doesn't) the "joint and combined" fetish is driven not by any real strategic, operational, or tactical requirements but rather by the budgetary process.

And, that, bucko, is a very, very poor way to plan and conduct military operations.

While the Deep Thinkers of the national security community are at it, they might consider the need for reconfiguring the American special and black operations capacities. As events of recent vintage in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North or Northwest Africa have shown, there is an increasingly blurred line between the operational divisions of CIA and the blacker portions of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Complicating this is a corollary merging of the intelligence collection functions of CIA's HUMINT component and the equivalents in SOCOM.

Blurring, merging, overlapping between black or paramilitary operations and HUMINT collection is both dangerous and counterproductive. Almost as bad is the insensible, unplanned and reactive melding of the Agency's paramilitary or black operations capacities with any similar capacities in SOCOM. Clear lines of command, responsibility and tasking are necessary for effectiveness. So also is common doctrine, shared mindset and world view.

The separation with careful coordination between intelligence collection and operational execution is also utterly essential. As the record of WW II in Europe demonstrates convincingly, a carefully orchestrated and coordinated separation of intelligence and operations is utterly essential. Otherwise the spooks and the black ops types not only step on each others cloaks, but get stabbed with one another's daggers.

There are many other areas where our forces doctrines, structures, orientations and postures can be and should be re-evaluated and reconfigured. Dr Gates is definitely on the side of the angels when he urges such.

However, it is mission critical that any review, any reconfiguration, any structure, posture and doctrine changes be based not on changes in technologies, new turns on the wheel of offense and defense but on a realistic understanding of the nature of the wars we will be fighting in the years to come. To suggest otherwise is to assure an ultimate failure in the process.

The bitch of it all is the failure will not be evident until too many body bags come home in a war not yet fought. And, by then, it is way too late.

ADMIN NOTE: Comments are invited, welcomed and will be posted but due to spam comments the Geek has been forced to take defensive measures. He apologizes for any inconvenience or frustration.

Attack Of The Killer Bots

Science fiction writers back in the Fifties and Sixties wrote a number of high quality yarns dealing with the notion of autonomous, lethal robots as the primary war fighters of the future. While none had the planet-busting capacities imputed to Gort in the classic flick, Day the Earth Stood Still, these fictive creations were impressively deadly.

Continuing the trajectories of the past seven or so years modestly into the future as the fine folks at the Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) and other components of the DoD's research and development community (which collective the Geek refers to as Weapons Advanced Research Investigations Group or WARPIG) are tasked to do, it is evident that reality will have caught up with sci-fi by 2015 at the latest. The people in the air-conditioned control facility in Nevada running Predators and Reapers on the other side of the Earth will be as obsolescent as the eyeball only forward controllers of past years and wars.

The High Minded Deep Thinkers of the Legal War variety are already in a tizzy over the potential of gun and missile slinging autonomous killerbots roving the earth below and the sky above looking for someone to kill, something to blow up. These academic and jurisprudential types are fretting over the prospect that without a human in the loop, future wars will of necessity be cluttered by heaps of dead non-combatants and piles of ruins which were previously hospitals, orphanages and religious facilities.

The techno-wonks reply, "Pashaw!" They argue that properly written programs will prevent such targeting errors. They add that killerbots will lack the emotions which cloud human decision making.

The Geek is not competent to comment on programming matters. He is, however, qualified by both experience and study to acknowledge that in contact, in a firefight, after being covered by slime which a moment ago was one's buddy's brains, cool and rational thought is impaired, the emotions run high and the right index finger can twitch with wild abandon.

The techo types finally argue that the pace of some combat operations such as air-to-air contact is simply too rapid for slow human mental processes. Besides, they contend, autonomous systems typified by the Navy's Phalanx Close-In Weapons System have been in use for years without controversy.

The Geek finds nothing wrong with these two contentions.

However, both the techos and the war ethicists miss a critical point. They both show a lack of understanding as to the nature and character of war. This point was also missed by the science fiction writers of past decades.

War is waged in order to force one side to submit to the policy dictates of the other. Both sides are pursuing a political end by violent means. In the eyes of each belligerent, the political goal represents a better state of peace. They can't both be right. The gods of battle determine which will prevail.

War is at root a contest not simply of arms and armies but of political will, of determination, of the capacity to endure regardless of sacrifice, regardless of misery, regardless of bloodshed and destruction. It is a contest between humans and the material agencies they create.

Historically war between enemies of equal technological capacity and levels of organisational complexity has ended either in an inconclusive stalemate or in the obliteration of one combatant's forces in the field, political will and social cohesion. Wars between belligerents which are not relatively equal in industrial/technological capacities and political/social organisational complexity have ended when one side loses political will and quits.

The only exceptions to that general statement have come when the "winning" side has such an abundance of material and human resources as well as a very high level of political will that the war ends with the total subjugation of the loser. The best, most recent examples of this are the vast number of colonial wars waged across North and South America, Africa and Asia during the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.

Importantly, no war--that's right--no war has been a contest between materiel per se. No country has been defeated simply through the destruction of materiel and physical plant. Not the Confederate States. Not Germany in either World War. Not even Japan even after the US Air Forces had leveled square mile after square mile of every Japanese urban industrial center.

People continue wars because men of their side die in combat. In a very real sense every war reaches a stage where the dead dictate policy. Where the collective political voice of a nation demands that their dead shall not have died in vain.

People end wars because enough folks on their side have died. Because the fear and loathing of death and destruction become more powerful than the initial commitment to the goal of the war or even the belief that the dead shall not have died in vain.

When the course of political will is tracked in every war of the modern (and now the so called post-modern) period, there is a direct link between combat deaths and, first, an increase in determination, followed by a progressive enervation of political will until terminal war weariness sets in.

In short, wars are not some sort of high-tech, high-expense form of chess. Without the up-close and personal human involvement in war, there can be no outcome. Not even semi-permanent closure of hostilities.

A war waged in whole or in major part by autonomous killer robots would, at the very best, resemble the limited wars of the Eighteenth Century in Europe. The wars were limited in death. Very limited in destruction. And, very, very inconclusive. As a result wars followed one another like circus elephants in trunk-to-tail procession.

Not until the wars of the French Revolution did war become a bloody, human contest with goals beyond the adjustment of boundaries or the satisfaction of royal egos. Then and only then did war once again become a struggle of political wills with genuine and long lasting results--including, it must be added, the cause of future wars.

Even the limited war in support of policy (or as it now called "overseas contingency operations") is at root a contest of political will. For Americans this kind of war, the most common it should be noted, is particularly difficult to understand and fight. We have a particular horror of casualties, particularly those of the fatal sort, so we bend our abilities to the task of winning while saving American lives.

There is nothing wrong with desiring to save the maximum number of American lives. The Geek is all in favor of that. With one proviso.

If, in the attempt to limit American exposure to risk, the US forces fight in a way which fails to undercut the opponent's political will, the war will drag on and on without an end in sight. There will be no better state of peace emerging.

OK, to err on the side of accuracy, there is another proviso, but it is linked to the first. If the US wages war in the wrong way or uses the wrong weapons, the very fact of doing so will strengthen the enemy's political will to resist. This is particularly true when the war is, to the Americans, a mere limited effort in support of some policy, and, to the enemy, it is an existential war or a war of transcendent significance.

The war currently being waged in Afghanistan and (in pertinent part) the FATA of Pakistan is such a war. For us it is merely an excursion in policy and punishment. For the Islamist jihadists of the target area, it is a war which is both existential and transcendent.

Our stand-off way of fighting can and has inflicted casualties on the enemy. It has killed key leadership cadre members.

But (here it comes again, the big "but") it has not undercut political will. Indeed, more than adequate information exists to support the contention that the remote control Predator and Reaper operations like air delivered death generally has been defined by potential targets as pusillanimous at best. They hold us in contempt for the way we fight.

You don't win by machines breaking machines. You don't win by machines merely killing people. You don't win by killing people. You win by killing political will within a group.

This means some must be killed. But, they have to be killed in the right way. Killer robots are not and never will be able to fill that mission.

What's Up With The Overseas Contingency Operations?

Yes, that is the new, improved and more-or-less officially approved term for the old Global War on Terror. Let's say it all together now, "Overseas Contingency Operations."

Good. Very good, even.

While lacking drama the new bureaucratic term has the advantage of being more accurate than the phrase it replaces. True, the Geek being a traditionalist prefers the long passe, Interventionary operations, but, what the hey? It is time for a change.

More change is required than simple alterations in the Official Lexicon. Of these, three stand out as being particularly time sensitive. In order of importance these are:

1.) Deciding just what our operations are directed for or against,

2.) Determining the goal of our contingency operation in Afghanistan,

3.) Assuring that our withdrawal from Iraq is both orderly and effective.

The complication?

As is (or should be) self-evident the three tasks are tightly joined. No single one can be addressed with effect without considering the impact on the other two.

Throughout the past eight years there has been a nearly impenetrable fog surrounding the nature and character of our strategic goals in the two totally disconnected wars we have been waging. That fundamental intellectual and policy flaw has prevented any chance of formulating a unified goal. It has prevented an effective and proper definition of the "enemy" against which our operations are directed.

Of all the mistakes and blunders committed by the W. Bush administration, the largest and most serious was that of falsely linking the punitive expedition against al-Qaeda and its accessory Taliban with the invasion of Iraq. From that flows all the other contradictions, confusions and conundrums of US strategy (if that is the right word) over the past seven plus years.

Since the pressure of high visibility combat operations in Iraq has been removed, the time has come to determine just what the enemy is now. Is the enemy the armed fighters in Afghanistan? Does the enemy include the combatants in Pakistan? Or, as some have argued for years, is the enemy the large and somewhat amorphous mass falling under the term "jihadist?" Does the enemy include all Islamists who pursue the totalistic goal of imposing Sharia in countries where that is not now the case?

How the enemy is defined controls what the political goal toward which the instruments of national power including lethal military capacities will be directed. That in turn serves to define not only "victory" but the markers which help measure progress toward the goal. The definition of the enemy also helps to determine how and where armed force should or must be employed in order to achieve the political goal.

This necessary first step was never undertaken by the previous administration. Now, despite the breather provided by the slackening of combat operations in Iraq, it seems that the Obama administration is too concerned with defining trees to stand back and demarcate the forest.

If this continues there is every possibility that the Obama administration will not see any greater success than did its predecessor. Where the Bush regime saw the seemingly successful end to the Iraq invasion, the Obama crew may see an end to combat operations in Afghanistan. Neither has nor will do anything to insure the long term national security and strategic interests of the US.

If the goal in Afghanistan is, as at least some of the President's remarks seem to indicate, the eradication of any base of terrorist operations in that country, then the US and its allies must focus exclusively on killing al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, commanders and members of its active mass support base. There is no requirement for any "nation-building."

So far, all the effort and money placed into the "nation-building" side of the massive efforts in Afghanistan have not produced a pay off commensurate with the expense. Or, such is the conclusion of the congressionally mandated special inspector-general, Arnold Fields. The thirty-two gigabucks have been in large measure blown away for no useful purpose.

True, in light of the proposed budget the money is not even up to the chump change level. What is important is that its expenditure past, present and proposed underscores the lack of strategic or even tactical focus which has, is and will bedevil our efforts to defeat Taliban et al on the ground.

One solution is to turn over "nation-building" to an amphyctony of the High Minded, kick in our fair share of the money and get on with the key task of militarily defeating Taliban et al. That job is big enough. But, unlike the vision of constructing a nation-state out of the tribal and linguistic morass called Afghanistan, it is achievable.

Arguably, the task of defeating Taliban in Afghanistan cannot be accomplished without defeating Taliban in Pakistan. That contention is explicit in the geographic, demographic and political realities on the ground. There are two ways to include Pakistan in the goals of our "contingency operation" in Afghanistan.

The first is direct. This implies not only continuing with our Predator and Reaper attacks in the FATA (and beyond if necessary) but adding in special operation and American controlled and directed paramilitary units as well. Of course, the direct route has the strong potential of further destabilization of the current Pakistani government. Running that increased risk requires as a foundation a clear definition of who we are fighting--and for what goal.

The second approach to the Pakistani complication is the indirect. At root that means continuing what we have been doing in providing support to the Pakistani government and military but, hopefully, doing this with greater benefit. The state of play in Pakistan whether from a political or a demographic perspective gives no great ground for optimism. No strong reason that the indirect approach will work one whit better in the future than it has in the past.

Pakistan is heavily polluted by Islamist ideology. The Pakistani military, intelligence service, much of the government and many within the population have been, are and will continue to be focused on India. Islam, including the Islamist variant, has always been and will continue to be the single definer of Pakistan in relation to its Sub-continent neighbor. Afghanistan, as the Geek has argued before, constitutes part of Pakistan's strategic depth. So also do the Muslim populated Central Asian Republics.

The notion of an "Islamabad Caliphate" holding sway over these areas makes a great deal of sense to more than a few in the command circles of the Pakistani military, intelligence sevice and government. It would not be an unwelcomed development to the indigeneous Islamists of Swat, the FATA and elsewhere in the state.

This underlying reality is critical to any decision broadening the definition of enemy to include the Islamist jihadists of Pakistan. Still, if the overall national security goal of the US and other countries is the elimination of sanctuaries for those contemplating acts of transnational terror, Pakistan is even more critical than Afghanistan.

Once again the identity of the enemy tells you where, how and why to fight him. It also tells you what the goal and definition of victory must be.

We are at the point of more-or-less declaring "victory" in the unnecessary "contingency operation" in Iraq. The violence is down. Way down.

(Last week the central morgue in Baghdad reported no unidentified corpses were recovered from the city streets for the first time since the US invasion. Two years ago, the daily count reached nearly two hundred.)

There is a government in place. It is functioning--sort of. A number of critical issues of governance, economics and infrastructure are not being addressed with dispatch and effect. The reconstruction effort is far from complete even though the US flooded the place with greenbacks and Iraq floats on an ocean or two of oil.

Still paying the price for the years of Saddamist repression and US sponsored total confusion, Iraqi bureaucrats and technocrats lack the skill or personal authority to make decisions, get projects underway and completed or perform other critical functions. For similar reasons the security situation while greatly improved is still far from one of tranquility.

And, the long shadow of Iran hangs like the smoke of an oilfield fire over Iraq.

The US and Iraq are committed to the extraction of US forces. The exact timing is still unclear given that the Iraqi people are going to vote on the matter in a couple of months. But, in any event the overwhelming bulk of our troops both combat and support will be gone in well under two years.

If we take history as our guide (think South Vietnam after 1973) once our forces leave, they ain't ever coming back. While a frank Iranian attack would be sufficient to assure our return to the area, anything less overt will not pull our national trigger.

As W. Bush finally admitted in the last days of his administration, what will come about in Iraq may not be "all" or even, (the Geek adds) anything of what we hoped for in March 2003. So be it. Short of an outrage such as an Iranian invasion we and the world will be stuck with whatever the Iraqis create in the months and years to come.

That includes the potential of another Islamist jihadist sponsoring regime. This will demand once more that we define the enemy.

Even the most broad definition of enemy does not include Islam per se or Muslims generally. The most expansive definition conceivable in the real world is that the enemy is the Islamist: the Muslim who pursues the goal of establishing Sharia by force, threat of force or political subversion. A more narrow yet still realistic definition of enemy is the jihadist: the persons or groups which seek to employ open or clandestine violence in pursuit of an Islamist goal.

The narrowest definition is that of meeting a specific threat. The enemy is defined simply and solely as the person or group seeking to undertake or which has undertaken a specific action against the domestic peace or strategic interests of the US.

This narrow definition could be further refined by goal. Will our "contingency operation" be preventative in goal? Disruptive? Or will it be reactive, punitive?

The W. Bush administration attempted in a less-than-nuanced form to define the enemy in the narrow sense with an emphasis upon preventative or disruptive efforts. The much maligned "Bush Doctrine" tried without meaningful success to assure the US and those who wished us ill that we would act before we were attacked.

The Obama administration would be very well advised to revisit the Bush Doctrine. Revise it perhaps, reformulate its wording quite possibly, but make a decision on the nature of the enemy. Decide if the enemy was to be the object of an "overseas contingency operation" before he struck. Or, is the US going to adopt a "second strike" policy and wait until the enemy defines himself by an overt act, an attack?

The first principles of national security and the protection of strategic interest demand the administration make a choice. Make a definition. Make it publicly. Make it quickly.