Thursday, August 31, 2006

Lehman makes a bid for SECDEF?

Interesting article in the Washington Post via US Naval Institute Proceedings from John Lehman, a former SECNAV under Reagan and member of the 9/11 Commission. A little over the top on the naval analysis regarding China and the PLA Navy. China's making a bid for a green-water navy based along an access denial posture, they are NOT acquiring a blue-water fleet for power projection. For the most part though, a nice piece.

Washington Post

We're Not Winning This War: Despite Some Notable Achievements, New Thinking Is Needed on the Home Front and Abroad

John Lehman

Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.

One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.

Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5.

The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.

The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.

Full Article.

Lehmen's makin' a bid for SECDEF. Rummy's days are numbered.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Background on the Revolt Part II

WHEW...damn these briefs are taking their toll. Just finished for the night but my vehicle is out of commision so instead of going to the "back to school social" thought I'd drink a few beers and finish the background.

Results from the hearings were mixed and historical interpretation of the events of 1949 have mainly broken along partisan lines. The primary investigators and subsequent students of these events have typically been military officers and most have found it difficult to approach the subject objectively. Air Force accounts, written by active officers or sympathetic civilians, normally acquit the Air Force of any serious wrongdoing and laud the leadership of Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington. These studies accuse the Navy of obstructionism and refer to its admirals as “unreconstructed” crybabies “dragged kicking and screaming into the National Security Act of 1947” because they refused to accept the authority of a “strong” Secretary of Defense. Conversely, naval officers praise the “admirals” aggressiveness and are exceptionally critical of Johnson and Symington. Jeffrey Barlow’s latest attempt to examine the revolt, an exhaustive opus of research, yielded the same results. As a historian at the Naval Historical Center he faulted absolutely no one in the Navy for allowing the public’s perception of the service to decay and even dedicated his efforts to the naval aviators, all innocent victims, he argued, of a vindictive Air Force. Consequently, in order to understand the revolt of the admirals effectively, a moderate approach that utilizes methodologies typically absent from a purely military perspective is called for.

Military history typically breaks into three separate types: popular military history, a top-down approach which normally focuses on battles, heroic leaders, and grand campaigns; academic military history or the often styled “new military history,” which examines broader aspects of war such as combat motivation, the lived experiences of “common” soldiers, and more recently other social, cultural, and gender issues; and finally military history for the security/defense professional, who are typically interested in the subject for a “lessons learned” context. Sadly, historians, be they academic or “amateur,” have rarely combined these methodological approaches and the “Revolt of the Admirals” has been no exception. This failure has occurred in academic circles due to a number of circumstances.

Unfortunately for the everyday consumer of history, in the present academic climate, popular history is slowly dying because historians have retreated from the public realm and the art of the narrative has been abandoned. Popular history remains an anathema to academics. Most choose to write history purely for their own auspices and engage with “outsiders” only on rare occasions. Ivory tower culture, consumed with careerism, demands this practice. Academic historians, the reasoning goes, should write for the academy; a “good” historical work should influence historiography, be grounded in methodological theory, reflect en-vouge paradigms, and should always be published by an academic press. To violate these principles, unless soundly tenured, is to risk one’s career. Yet adhering to this strict intellectual outline often stifles the slowly-dying art of the historical narrative because accepted structures and methodologies are allowed to eclipse the story of individual actors caught up in seminal events.

Academic military historians have traditionally been an exception to this rule. Often confining themselves to the study of combat, military historians have relied heavily on the narrative in order to tell the story of war. However, in attempt to answer New Left and postmodern criticism, many historians have attempted to broaden the field of military history by turning to culture and gender analysis. Yet many of these “war and society” historians often overemphasize these methodologies to such an extent that they become the subject of analysis rather than another tool utilized to understand a separate aspect of the narrative story. Historians write books on War and Gender rather than studying why masculine or feminine constructs influence individual decision-making in a given situation. Therefore, the narrative is also disappearing from the academic military history vernacular.

The narrative’s disappearance from academic circles has meant a deprofessionalization of the historical field by outsourcing readable historical literature to writers outside the Academy. Often bored and/or confused by the disjointed prose and indiscernible jargon employed by academic historians, the average reader has become skeptical of the “new military history” because it fails to employ a sound narrative that still tells a “good story.” Conversely military officers and defense professionals, interested in strategy, civil-military relations, and other aspects of war for career development, shy away from “war and society” studies because they proclaim little interest for bottom-up history and believe New Left methodologies to be academic exercises unimportant to their profession.

The revolt of the admirals, however, presents the historian with a unique opportunity to engage academics, military professionals, and popular audiences alike. The events make an enticing story, as Jeffrey Barlow so aptly states: “It contained many of the elements of human passion that make a good story: secret (and perhaps sinister) dealings by individuals and organizations; anonymous charges of malfeasance and financial corruption in connection with an important defense contract; and an openly aired rivalry between two powerful military services, the Navy and the Air Force.” For the academic audience and especially the “new” military historian, the events of 1949 present ample opportunity to broaden the field of military history. The Air Force as well as the Navy went to great lengths to impress their opposing views upon American society. Both parties actively sought to tailor public perception by working aggressively with newspaper editors, movie producers, and other makers of popular culture to create a public image of their service that would yield popular support during the intense competition of the acquisitions process.

The revolt also provides important teachings for the defense community. Despite teaching valuable lessons in civil-military relations, the revolt also indicates that military officials should rethink their ideas about the irrelevance of culture. Most military officers and defense professionals are convinced that the cultural overlays of the “new military history” have no place in the defense profession. They frown upon “war and society” studies because most believe these methodologies provide no concrete lessons for modern security studies. Yet the revolt of the admirals seems to indicate the contrary, a lesson the United States Navy learned in 1949 with bitter tears. Public perception of the military establishment, normally determined through popular cultural, matters greatly to the military profession, especially in a democracy. Combat operations in Korea, Vietnam and present-day Iraq have all shown that the most powerful military force in the world can easily be subdued if public support turns sour. In the case of the “revolt of the admirals” this same public support became vital for the appropriations process. If American society smiled upon a particular branch of the armed forces, then imposing that services strategic views upon American policy and acquiring funds from Congress, the governmental embodiment of the people, became all the more easier. The United States Air Force understood this fact in 1949, the Navy did not. Secrecy became a Navy watchword while the Air Force operated much more openly.

In March 1947 Admiral Forrest Sherman unveiled a new naval strategy for combating the Soviet Union. Grounded in traditional Mahanian principles, Sherman argued that the Soviet submarine threat, the greatest threat to American control of the seas, could not be controlled by traditional methods of antisubmarine warfare (ASW). Escort vessels and aircraft, the traditional weapons of defense against submarines in World War II, could not detect the new Soviet boats and in order to neutralize the threat Sherman advocated hitting Soviet naval bases with carrier based aviation, attacking the submarines at their source. Yet while this new strategy provided a sound rationale for spending a large amount of money on carrier aviation, the Navy failed to share Sherman’s strategy with the public and kept it locked away fearing it would be discovered by the Soviet Union. Therefore, without proper schooling in the strategy’s merits, neither Congress nor the American public understood the Navy’s rationale for building a large carrier program.

Passage of the National Security Act placed the naval service on the defensive as it fought the Army and Air Force for their preferred organizational concepts. With these animosities created, the armed services, now forced to share an ever-decreasing defense budget, were thrown into an intense competition for funding. The strategic concepts of each particular service became dependent on receiving a large share of the defense budget in order to acquire a force structure capable of carrying out these particular strategies. In this culture of competition a bitter debate over proper roles and missions ensued. In order to convince the American people that their views were best, the services needed every avenue of public approach.

Following the National Security Act, the Air Force implemented a brilliant public relations campaign. The air service worked closely with newspaper reporters, magazine editors, and even Hollywood to convince Americans that strategic bombing, the Air Force’s preferred operational concept, could assure an American victory in a war with the Soviet Union. Yet the Navy ignored the public and chose to argue its case through less-public channels. During the tenure of Defense Secretary Forrestal, a pro-Navy man, the sea service could get away with these techniques. Its weak public relations campaign was largely irrelevant because Forrestal essentially emphasized the same strategic concepts as the Navy and listened carefully to the ideas of each service. Yet after his dismissal, the Navy’s poor PR work became blindingly apparent. Louis Johnson cared little for Forrestal’s compromising style and took it upon himself to start “banging heads together” at the Pentagon. After the pro-Air Force Johnson decided to cancel the USS United States, the Navy received little sympathy from the public. The resignation of Navy Secretary John Sullivan compounded these difficulties and deprived naval officers of a sympathetic civilian voice in the Truman administration. Faced with an Air Force-minded public and a civilian leadership united against them, all products of a brilliant public relations campaign conducted by the Air Force, a congressional hearing became the Navy’s only recourse and the revolt of the admirals ensued.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Background on the Revolt Part I

Sometimes when I write I make the mistake of assuming that my readers know too much. A professor once told me that an "intelligent" peer should be able to pick up an academic paper and understand it. Therefore, difficult terms and foreign concepts should be defined and explained. However, I am not a very good judge of what an "intelligent" person is supposed to know.

I say all this as a disclaimer because it occurred to me that I needed to introduce my thesis topic if I'm going to be posting on it extensively and I'm not sure how accessible it will be to the average reader. Most of what I'll be writing will come directly from my thesis. If something doesn't make sense let me know because it probably needs correcting in my final draft. Also, my apoligees to the citation police. I've got no idea how to footnote in blogger but most of what I'll be writing about is original. In sections that draw heavily on sources I'll try to include some kind of citation. With that said, let's begin our education on the "Revolt of the Admirals."

On the week of October 17, 1949 readers of Time magazine found news on a civil-military relations feud in an article titled the “Revolt of the Admirals.” As the periodical’s opening act, the story spoke, in a somewhat sensationalist tone, of a U.S. Navy “outburst” before the House Armed Services Committee that finally brought the Navy’s “rebellion” into the public eye “with all the impressive might of a carrier strike.” The article’s release marked the culmination of an endless story that played itself out on the front pages of American newspapers, morning by morning, for over two weeks until “the revolt” finally came to a climax in the press on the opening pages of Time.

Yet, the events normally attributed to “the revolt of the admirals” began earlier that spring. By March 23, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, a pro-Navy compromiser and former Secretary of the Navy, had been removed from office. The fiscal-minded Louis Johnson, a Truman political stooge rumored to have close ties with the newly created United States Air Force took his place. After only a month in office, Johnson canceled construction on the USS United States, a flush-deck aircraft carrier designed to operate aircraft capable of atomic delivery, without so much as a nod to the Secretary of the Navy, who was conveniently out-of-town, or the Chief of Naval Operations. John Sullivan, the Navy Secretary, immediately resigned in furious protest and fired off an angry letter castigating the Secretary of Defense for actions he deemed recklessly tragic. As a replacement for Sullivan Truman nominated Francis Matthews, a Johnson yes-man with absolutely no experience in naval affairs or Washington politics.

In early May an anonymous letter surfaced in the offices of several pro- Navy congressman. The document alleged serious improprieties had taken place in the Air Force’s procurement of the B-36, an intercontinental bomber about which many pilots had serious reservations, and accused Secretary Johnson and Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington of benefitting financially from its acquisition. Two sets of hearings were subsequently called by Congressman Carl “swamp fox” Vinson, the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in order to substantiate the document’s claims and allow Navy officers to voice their opinions, which had long been simmering, on defense unification and national strategy.

The first set of hearings were a disaster for the Navy. The accusations made in the anonymous document quickly proved to have no basis in fact while Cedric Worth, a special assistant to Undersecretary of the Navy Dan Kimball, was exposed as the author of the letter, a serious public relations setback. Yet, under the leadership of the redoubtable Arthur Radford, the Navy soldiered on and, with their careers on the line, testified that Johnson’s defense policies were destroying naval aviation. Too much emphasis was being placed in war planning against the Soviet Union on the Air Force’s atomic blitz, they argued, an immoral method of warfare that could not assure victory. If these policies were allowed to continue, they warned, national security would be seriously jeopardized and the Navy would be torn apart.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The Greater Good Reconnect

Finally submitted my thesis tentatively titled "The Influence of Rebellion upon Sea Power: The Revolt of the Admirals and the Fight for Navy Air" yesterday. It's weird being finished. Although I'm of the opinion that a project of this scope is never "finished." I wish I had another two months. Subconsciously I think I'm hanging on to this paper because I know that stopping will end my graduate education, at least for now and it's very VERY hard to admit that I have to stop. However, no matter how hard it is, I need to shift my priorities because I started orientation for law school today. It's time to stop.

But thankfully, I still have my blog, to maintain the connection.

Over the next few weeks I plan on settling into what will hopefully be a consistent blogging schedule as I prepare my arguments for the thesis defense. Barring any significant changes in my reading schedule for law school, I'm going to try and post at least once a week. These posts will probably be composed on Saturday or Sunday mornings, depending on how I decide to spend the previous night (Sunday morning posts following an Ole Miss home game will NEVER occur). Weekday posts will be rare and will probably be of limited analysis as briefing cases will probably take up the majority of my free time during the week.

Once more into the breach dear friends! Until the weekend shall we say?