Unrestrained Greed









Biased BBC

Sean LaFreniere



Michael Moore Hates America

Who Knew

Citizen Smash aka Lt. Smash

THE MESOPOTAMIAN

Harry's Place

COUNTERCOLUMN

Froggy Ruminations



On the Third Hand

NRA News

INDC Journal

Power Line

My War (CENSORED!)

Wizbang

Free Iraqi

Joe Galloway: Senior Military Reporter

The Questing Cat

MilBlogs

 
Weapons and Training for Iraqi Security Forces

A recent objection to the conduct of the war raised by Marc Cooper is that we are not training Iraqi security forces with US weapons. The central questions in this issue are availability of weapons and speed of training.

Providing weapons, ammunition, and parts for hundreds of thousands of troops and police is not a small task. One of the ways that the coalition partners were able to contribute to the effort in Iraq was providing weapons. The small arms used by Iraqi troops are NATO standard weapons provided by coalition partners from the former Warsaw Pact. Some of our allies use Warsaw Pact munitions because they used to belong and they have the capacity to produce their own armaments. Most of these weapons are durable, inexpensive, and in wide use around the world. There is an abundance of ammunition and parts available for these weapons.

The availability of weapons from Coalition partners is much greater mainly because the weapons procurement process the US must undergo is possibly the least dynamic in the industrialized world. Beyond the necessity for every weapons system to involve the maximum number of congressional districts, there also is a requirement to maintain an immense procurement empire in the Department of Defense. Purchasing new weapons from our allies and coalition partners was much faster. Quite simply, if we had been compelled to use US procurement to obtain weapons for the Iraqi security forces, we would probably still be waiting for them.

There has been raised the possibility of using the old weapons of the former regime military. Under the former regime, Iraqi soldiers in the field drank from the ditch while their officers had bottled water in the desert heat. The condition of the former regime's weapons reflected the quality of their leadership, execrable. It would have taken a tremendous amount of time, money, and effort to aggregate, inventory, and repair all those used weapons for reissue. Restoring hundreds of thousands of badly neglected battle rifles was a waste we avoided by purchasing high quality, inexpensive new weapons.

Beyond simply providing the weapons to be used, training is an immense hurdle to providing an effective fighting force. Iraq has a large number of veterans with at least some experience with Warsaw Pact equipment and it is far easier to develop mastery than retrain on a new systems. One of the hardest skills to teach is high order maintenance and repair, and it was faster and easier to train the new security forces with weapons they were familiar with.

The US weapons systems are also difficult and unforgiving in a lot of ways. The M-16 is a remarkably effective weapon series, but it is also legendarily difficult to maintain. While we could have taken the time to train the Iraqi security forces on the US weapons, not doing so saved time. By using a weapon system that was inexpensive, available, and easier to train with, Iraqi security forces were able to get into battle sooner and with greater skill. That speed and skill is saving Iraqi and American lives.

 
Security and Irrational Risk

… (I do not regard the freedom of the Iraq a proper purpose for Americans to die for)…

Every action has a risk. Simply existing has a risk that an event out of your control will interact with you; not many people are struck down in the prime of life by meteors, but it happens and is a measurable risk. There exists no activity accomplished by Americans, or anybody else, which does not carry a level of risk.

One of the most important aspects of the professional military that has been built since the end of the Vietnam War is our appreciation and control of risk. Some elements of the various safety regimens have trended to the ridiculous, but mostly the US military has become better for studying and managing risks and benefits.

The above quote is a sample of the irrational emphasis on safety common in political discussions about the war. By taking so absolute a stand, the author of denies the any action, save divine intervention, on our part to help the Iraqi people. While I don't object to service members praying for the Iraqi people, I cannot recommend it as the centerpiece of a strategic action plan for the Middle-East. Regrettably, opposition to the war has established miracles as the only munition acceptable to them. This is not a rational basis for security.

All of us in the military are volunteers. I volunteered again this year to serve with the reserve unit that was most likely to deploy. I did so because I felt that I could make a reasonable contribution with a marginal amount of risk. The units serving in Iraq are also experiencing high levels of re-enlistments. Part of this is due to exceptional leadership, but a lot of it is due to service members willing to accept a reasonable amount of risk to accomplish something.

Missing in the discussion of the value of American lives is the value of what is being achieved. There are about 25 million Iraqi's and we have so far lost less than 2,100 Americans. Is one American life worth the freedom of 1,000 Iraqi's? What about 10,000? Do the math any way you want, but those who are taking the risks are accepting them by re-enlisting in record numbers. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are investing themselves in the freedom of the Iraqi people.

If this discussion was taking place over coffee at Lloyd's of London, it would take moments. A risk is being offered and rational investors are placing themselves at stake to cover it at the defined rate of return. The concerns of people not involved in the transaction would probably result in a series of boring dinner party conversations, but nothing else. Since we are in a democracy, we are exposed to those same insipid dinner party guests every day on national television. The exposure has not given them a better appreciation of risk or return, or in fact an offering of what they would be willing to invest in. The opposition to the war has not defined a rational level of risk they will accept to achieve greater security.

 
Sticker Shock

Anti-War political operatives were discomfited yesterday when their congressional representatives were compelled to vote to lose immediately. This upset the entire notion to purchase failure in Iraq on the installment plan. The price of failure in stark terms was too much to bear as a flat payment. For longer than I have been alive, it has been the driving goal of a lot of people to convert everybody to the faith that nobody ever wins a war. As success comes closer to arriving in Iraq, the religious fervor of the pacifist faithful has become more desperate.

While this war has been hard, the professionalism of our troops has allowed them to buy success with gallons of sweat and only a small amount of blood. We mourn those who were taken from us and those who have suffered lasting harm, but their losses have not yet been in vain. The care taken by our forces to accomplish something significant with the lowest losses possible is about to be repudiated by people committed to losing at any price. While our Generals have certainly learned the lessons of running an effective counter-insurgency campaign, the opposition to the war is utterly committed to repeating the mistake of abandoning the people we try to free like they did in Vietnam. The American Friends Service Committee is trying to support the troops by the peculiar tactic of cutting them off without a cent. Others are subtly and often flatly lying about the level of success in Iraq, when they can't ignore it.

No longer can the opposition groups claim to be opposed to the war, because they aren't paying any attention to the actual conflict. When measurable quantities are mentioned, they are never related to any operational details. The 2,100 deaths are not compared to the hundreds of thousands of raids, searches, sorties, or even enemies captured and killed. Compared to any other modern war, this has been astonishingly effective. Compared to any other counter-insurgency, this is a miracle. The opposition is not mounting a principled campaign to protect our troops, because history shows that our troops are their own best guardian. The opposition is primarily opposed to success, and history has shown that they will grind our soldier's bones without a care to block military success. We are not dealing with an anti-war movement; we are dealing with an anti-success movement.

One of the fears maintained by the anti-success movement is the notion of the deranged combat veteran loose in the world, unable to tell friend from foe, killing at the snap of a twig. While Post Traumatic Stress Disorder exists, the deranged veteran story has been disproved time without number. Regrettably, the same cannot be said about the leftover anti-war activists. Time without number, rational efforts to maintain our national security have been assaulted by purveyors of shame looking for someplace to unload their stale arguments. Now that the anti-war movement has fully distilled itself into the anti-success movement, we have a real concern about ending the war. What successes will they seek to kill next in the most successful nation in the world?

 
Bring Galloway to the US

The fatuous George Galloway is taunting the US from across the pond, daring us to bring charges. The diplomatic machinery associated with arresting a Member of Parliament and bringing him to justice will probably take years, at the end of which Galloway will probably slip out to some place where he can spend his millions. Of course, if he comes over here and releases himself to US custody, the regular diplomatic protections he is counting on will be for naught. To better drive home the hypocrisy of this pimp, let us do our part and take up a collection for his airline ticket and accommodations.

Put up or shut up George, and we'll buy the ticket to come over here. What the heck, if we raise enough money, maybe we can afford to buy his accommodations…until responsible federal agencies can take over that burden. I'm thinking something in keeping with his fondness for the proletariat…preferably close to an interstate…

 
Open Letter to Senator Gordon Smith

Senator Smith,

Thank you for asking my opinion this evening through your very detailed phone poll. Perhaps the polling organization should ask if the respondent is a blogger as well as asking if they are a reporter, because this is going straight to my blog. http://pslasswell.blogspot.com I wanted to communicate with you directly because some of my responses might be atypical, and I want to clarify them.

Please continue funding, and oversight, of the Title X contraception programs. I strongly believe that underage pregnancy is a substantial cause of misery in the United States. Tremendous potential is wasted when immature women become mothers, in both the parent and the child. I support adoption, but for many young girls with incomplete identities it is too hard to release the one person who will always make them unique. It is far better to help prevent a young woman's time of vulnerability from becoming permanent. The brutal truth is that nine out of ten underage mothers never climb out of poverty.

I also believe that you need to make sure that the funding for contraception is efficiently spent and reaching its intended users. I don't mind a little bit of wastage in making sure that plenty of contraception is available, because this is one form of medication that can save taxpayers a lot of money down the road. It is worth noting that all of Title X funding is less than the cost of one bridge in Alaska that serves no purpose other than to carry indigenous pork.

I would like to note that the one issue that matters to me most is the continued support of the Global War on Terror. Although it might seem attractive right now to start hedging away from President Bush on the war, I think that is due to a media bubble that is due to burst. The fact is that we are winning the war in Iraq and elsewhere, and those who think otherwise are watching biased media and not talking to the people who have been and are there. We have a stronger force than we had going into the war, and we are forging the leaders we will need for the rest of the century in the crucible of a very hard, but not very bloody war. (Look at the Battle of the Somme casualty statistics as a reference for what is a bloody fight.)

Thank you again for asking my opinion,

Patrick S Lasswell

 
Expert Advice on Disaster Relief

CAPT Jason Van Steenwyk is an expert on military logistics:

I've been a battalion S4 in combat, an HHC XO for dozens of major moves of a hundred miles or more, and an HHC company commander for six hurricane mobilizations.

Which means he's moved more people, more miles in a coordinated, effective manner than just about anybody you know who isn't a professional truck dispatcher. Pay attention to what he has to say about moving people or sound like an ass. Your call…

But suppose you stripped the evac effort dry and got enough busses to support a 5,000 man move. Well, a few hundred of them would show up driving the brigade's vehicles (armed with fuel cards to use at pumps that don't work, so the army would also have to transport in its own bulk fuel).

Well, in order to move 4,400 soldiers by bus in 48 hours, with a 1-day turnaround time, you would need 100 busses. Which is most of the FEMA effort right there. The available truck transportation would be hauling food, water, tents, portable kitchens, and other gear -- not troops.

Well, I think FEMA came up with 140 busses. You want to strip 70 percent of the FEMA effort to bring in National Guard? I didn't think so.

I hope that more people will be listening to reason in the coming days and not just spouting off about the lack of response. Keep reading Jason and keep things in perspective.

 
A Great Evening at the Movies: "Serenity"

After waiting for a long time, I got to see a great science fiction movie tonight, "Serenity". The most dense, chewy, flavor-packed science fiction since "Blade Runner" and maybe a bit more than that; there was something for everybody. I'm sure that there are movie reviewers dull and derivative enough to find fault with the film. The rest of the world will get to see something fine, though.

The thing is, you really need to watch the original series to appreciate the depth of the character interaction and development. Please go out, rent the DVD set, watch it, and then go out and love the movie. Not because you deserve to see a great movie, but because I deserve to see as many sequels as possible.

Unlike the massive disappointments of other franchises, Writer-Director Joss Whedon knows how to stay true to his stories, especially when he is given room to develop them. More to the point, he knows how to get actors to give a lot more with familiar characters, and that just hasn't been the case elsewhere. The movie will be out on 30 September, unless you get to see an early screening like I did. You have plenty of time to get your hands on a copy of the series "Firefly" so you can fully enjoy "Serenity". Then maybe I'll be able to watch a series of great science fiction movies that I have been waiting my whole life for.

 
A Productive Annual Training

Three showers, two good nights sleep, and several hours of mindless computer game play later, I am now gaining the coherence necessary to write about this year's annual training. To give you some idea of how hard everybody in my unit worked, five minutes after the bus left the training area to take us back home, the driver looked back and there wasn't an open eye. Other units may be different, but I never saw a call for assistance go unanswered. Somebody always picked up the ball and helped you run with it. This doesn't happen in the "real" Navy, by the way. Out in the fleet it is all too common for divisions to ignore each other's difficulties, say "choose your rate, choose your fate" and let work pile up.

Another indicator of my unit's strength is that we are more ready to deploy now than we were two weeks ago. Think about that for a second; our readiness to mobilize is greater immediately after a mobilization than it was before. All of our gear is up, running, and more ready for deployment than before our annual training. As for our personnel, we are the most ready unit of its kind in the Navy. Of course that means that if the balloon goes up anywhere in the world, we go first; but we can brag like mad until then.

Part of the reason MIUW-110 gets these results is that the command recognizes the hard effort of extremely distinct personalities. If you are wacky and work really hard, you still get rewarded with my unit. One example of this is a supremely distinct Steelworker Second Class (SW2) who won his first Navy Achievement Medal on Friday. This Seabee came to MIUW-110 because we had equipment to work on and something to do. His nickname is "Shrek", and he publicly emulates an ogre; but he is one of the biggest hearted and hardest working people in the unit. He isn't pretty, politically correct, or the poster boy for clean living; but he has an active imagination and tremendous capacity to get the job done. No other unit in his active or reserve career ever gave him the recognition his work deserved, until now.

Another distinct personality the unit recognized on Friday was me. I was awarded my first Navy Achievement Medal within six months of rejoining the reserves, five months after my first drill with the unit. I earned it through making our "hopeless" sonar work, and doing my part to make possible the first sonar operations my unit carried out in over seven years. A lot of people told me that the system was useless, that nobody wanted it, that it was being phased out, and that I should forget about being a Sonar Technician. Part of the "distinctness" of my character is that I don't take being dismissed lightly. It really made me angry to have all of my experience and capability rejected out of hand because having working equipment was inconvenient. Part of the military experience is not saying dismissive persons are wrong, but instead proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt by doing your duty exceptionally well. It turns out that getting equipment working is more important than just getting along with people who tell you to ignore your duty. I did push some of the boundaries of that, but in the end my command supported my efforts and accepted my abrasiveness. That took some courage and integrity in my chain of command; in response I give them my loyalty and hard work.

I really am working at getting along with the members of my command who I rubbed the wrong way. Possibly I will even speak with greater tact and delicacy about some of the other units at the recent exercise who are still working up their teams. I can say with certainty that I very much enjoyed working with the great boat drivers at IBU-13 and IBU-15. MIUW-501 is very lucky to have the STGSN they sent to us for training. I do not envy the folks at the main base who had so much training thrown at them, regardless of the applicability of the training plan to their skill development. It was a complex exercise with a lot of ground to cover, and the base sailors took it in the shorts so that elements of a spreadsheet could get checked off. Since that spreadsheet isn't going to deploy anywhere, I have my doubts as to the value of focusing so exclusively on it. MIUW-110 exiled itself to a far corner of the exercise and improved the readiness of the command instead of somebody else's software.

Life is good. On the very first day I found a submarine…okay, it was on the surface and we saw it with our eyes before we set up the sonar, but all our Sonar Tech's made positive identification! I actually got to use my sonar with real sonobuoys in real water listening to real contacts. I qualified in three significant watchstations and made significant progress on two more. I won my first individual medal and made my wife very proud. It was a very productive annual training.

 
Centrism and Feedback

I had an interesting conversation with somebody so far to the left that he honestly views the overwhelming majority of the country as descending levels of conservative. The amazing part is that our conversation was remarkably civil. Mostly that was because he had left the "liberal orthodoxy" so long ago that he did not object in the slightest to my definition of political correctness. Some of his arguments closely resembled any number of scenes from "Life of Brian", and I wonder if he has ever seen that movie. Overall it was a fascinating experience for me at the end of a very bad week, and it provided an interesting insight.

The moment you realize you are completely wrong on a given point is the greatest inspiration to growth and healthy change that a human can have. Isolating yourself from that moment is the most damaging behavior imaginable, because you doom your actions to repeating wasteful, self-destructive futility. This fellow is earnest in his desire to create meaningful change. Regrettably, he has abandoned every reasonable metric by which to judge the effectiveness of his own actions and the causes he participates in. He dismissed all feedback I could give him with trivial irrelevancies and trite phrases from somewhere well to the left of Marx that were almost as dated as the "L' Internationale".

In conversations about centrism, my friend Michael Totten often mentions his frustration with the insulated character orthodox liberalism has taken on. Part of the blogosphere's value is that it strips away our insulation and confronts us with feedback from source data and observers of actual events. Centrism is hard because it demands that you abandon your preconceptions and rethink issues you resolved. This makes it extremely difficult to come up with a rallying call that survives ongoing analysis. Arguably the only banner centrists reliably agree upon after exhaustive discussion is an image of a plane flying into a building and the resolution to never again go meekly.

We can build on that framework. It remains to be seen how long other political entities can survive on the premise of ignoring, forgetting, and dismissing that critical feedback. It is essential for centrists to never allow the drive for political power to obscure the acceptance of honest feedback. It is like balancing on a ball, very difficult without a steadying influence. That image of a planeload of cowed and naïve victims flying into a building of the unaware is our anchor. We cannot meekly allow ourselves to fly unwitting and unaware into our doom. We must seek and analyze relevant feedback then act upon it.

 
Support the Troops…With Cash!

What if we presented taxpayers with the option of donating a portion of their tax return as a direct cash bonus to military personnel as a check box on their 1040? The proceeds would be split up evenly among the entire military and given as a tax-exempt bonus to each uniformed service member.

Yellow ribbon magnets on the backs of cars are nice, letters to the troops are great and actually going to a base and holding up signs thanking servicepersons is fantastic. A direct cash donation to the armed services from people who can afford it really would be a way for the people of the US to show their support unmistakably.

Thanks to Ben Stein for inspiring the idea.

 
Mosquitoes Don’t Kill People, Malaria is Genocidal

Someone over on Totten’s blog woke up and noticed that when a billion people following one religious belief get angry at you, they probably aren’t a serious military threat until their combined Gross Domestic Product gets close to that of California’s. (OK, that’s mostly true if “you” are the United States of America. If “you” are the Lakeview Bowling League, you’ve got a serious problem.) Since that degree of solvency hasn’t happened yet to Islam, the fundamentalist fringe of that religion might not actually be as big a threat as the Axis or the Soviet Union used to be.

My response is that mosquito bites will not kill you, even in Alaska. It is not the bite that gets you; it is the disease. Malaria carried by mosquitoes is responsible for genocidal levels of death each year. Totalitarian brutality and irresponsibility is the cause of untold deaths historically and currently. We are engaged in a fight against the diseases of totalitarianism, the current campaign of which is centered in the Middle East. In exactly the same way we all are lessened by the ravages of disease induced poverty, we are all lessened by the ravages of oppression induced brutality and waste.

This fight has gone on since before I was born and will go on long after I have died. Every day some new charismatic or bureaucratic schmuck gets a new buzz from the power of unchecked authority and goes out seeking their next fix. That phenomenon isn’t going to go away any time soon, and dealing with the excesses of power addiction takes time. For now, we have picked our battles and are doing remarkably well. More to the point, we are fighting and not allowing the cultural toxins of the disease to make us frail.

 
On Being a Hawk, Without Fowl Attachments

Thanks to all the Indepundit readers for coming and taking a look.

One small thing that is sure to be irrelevant soon: The name is spelled Lasswell.

Otherwise I associate myself with Smash’s comments.

 
In San Diego for Equipment Repair

I’m in San Diego to fix some of my unit’s equipment. The weather was supposed to be foggy and dull, but it turned out to be quite lovely: sunny with pleasant breezes. I did reconnaissance on the locations I need to be tomorrow because they were locations I haven’t been to in my previous tours here. I also got my hair cut at Marine Corps Recruit Depot because the barbers there cut the hair of Drill Sergeants, and take their work quite seriously. I want to be seriously squared away for tomorrow; reservists often get treated like dirt because they show up looking like a pile of burlap sacks. I am serious about my military bearing and responsibilities, and I want it to show.

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting the Indepundit himself today. One of the places I was checking out for tomorrow’s checking in was directly above where he was drilling this weekend. He was very pleasant to talk with, and although I am professionally obligated to disagree with his position on China, I understand his reasoning. I think I’ll try and steal a march on his position post and outline why I think he’s wrong.

Everybody in the armed services in the US swears first to uphold the Constitution of the United States; that is our primary obligation. If the sitting President should decide to engage in a land war in Asia without the approval of Congress, the troops aren’t going to fight. If units did deploy and the Congress and the Supreme Court opposed the action, the units would keep themselves alive and withdraw. That is how things would play out, and every President knows this.

China does not have that understanding implicit in the formation and control of the People’s Liberation Army. One of the central problems with the rubber-stamp fiat nature of the Communist Party is that once an action is taken, the Party can either embrace it or disavow it, they cannot debate the action. Additionally, the last war that China won was fighting against other Chinese. (If you want to consider the invasion of Tibet a war, go wild…but name one battle, first.) China’s generals do not know the limits of their competence, mostly because the last serious military action they took was twenty-seven years ago. In that action the Vietnamese Army handed them their heads, inflicting as many casualties in six weeks of campaigning on the Chinese than they did from 1962-1975 on the US.

The Indepundit will have you believe that the Chinese want to focus on business and trade and ignore Taiwan until the problem just goes away. To a large extent that is a true statement. However, the rural peoples who are not sharing in the wealth, and the military whose grasp on power is being eroded by the rising prosperity are not actually covered by this statement. There is a very real possibility that some People’s Liberation Army Warlor…General will decide to get froggy to maintain power.

I don’t want to go to war with China, but I want them to win one even less because of the consequences of rewarding military imperialism. Specifically, with the exception of Egypt and South Africa, China can now take and hold any nation in Africa. Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers will die through logistical incompetence, but they have always shown a willingness to throw bodies away for advantage. If we don’t stop China in Taiwan in this generation, we can’t stop them in the next from taking Africa. The People’s Liberation Army Warlor…Generals know this, too.

I’ll still be helping out with the Protest Warrior event this Saturday. If you’re in San Diego, or can get there, please come and support the troops.

 
Sun Tzu Was Pretty Specific About Attacking Prepared Positions…

It is a truly good that our enemies are spectacularly weak on reading military classics that are not the Koran. A Naval Officer weighs in on the enemy's escalation in Iraq. While some see this as a bad sign for us, having an enemy reinforce a strategic failure is not a sign of impending loss. Forgotten in Bill Roggio's analysis of the current situation is an appreciation of the growing effectiveness of Iraqi forces. More and more of the fight is being taken to the enemy by the Iraqi Army and Police. Read the whole thing and decider for yourself.

 
Towards a Better Definition of Terrorism Part Two

Jason Van Steenwyk replied to my first pass with the following:

Terrorism is not "pious" by definition, nor is it fraudulent. Some terrorists are pretty up front about their nature and their demands. It's not a misrepresentation.

What's wrong with "the use of violence, or threat of violence, against noncombatants in order to achieve political or economic ends?"

He brings up several good points and has the integrity to put his own definition up for discussion. I like the blogsphere because you get to have civil dialogues with people who have intellectual integrity. (Unlike for instance…college?)

There are some criteria for the definition that I left unsaid before, mostly because I wanted to get the idea out there for discussion as I was on my way to the base in the morning. So now that somebody agreed to play the game, let me write down the rules.

The definition needs to be exhaustive, to cover the relevant cases.
The definition needs to be exclusive, to eliminate specious cases.
The definition needs to be succinct, to eliminate boredom.
The definition needs to be direct, to inspire the people fighting this disease.

While Jason's definition is exhaustive and succinct, it lacks exclusivity and it nowhere near his capacity for mean. The two identities I wanted to exclude most from this definition's coverage were ordinary criminals and media twits. While Al Capone was a very bad man who probably deserved to die slowly of the clap, he was not a terrorist. When the Capone mob took a mistaken, and thankfully inaccurate, shot at my grandfather in Chicago they apologized in envelope form without lingering obligation. This is not behavior that fits a useful definition of terrorist.

Another group that needs to be excluded from this definition is the media twits. While they often strive to achieve the moral vacuity of terrorists, the participants of the show "Jackass" need to be kicked out of the set…if for no other reason than to keep them from getting the attention they are addicted to. I am not certain that my definition does enough to set aside their antics, since they will probably adapt their behavior to obtain the title if they think it will get them air time. This problem is central to the issue of terrorism, and my definition also ignores the media elephant in the room. Without a pervasive media to be co-opted, there probably would not be any terrorism to define.

In defense of my own definition, the concept of pious fraud probably should be hyphenated to indicate inextricability: pious-fraud. Terrorists operate under the cover of a piety that their actions render fraudulent. Part of being unkind to the bombers and beheaders is not playing along with their pretensions. If we dignify their violence, we excuse it, and thereby encourage it. Now that we have handed over the government and delivered elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have the moral authority to call the actions of others pious-fraud without meaningful disagreement.

I'd like to thank Jason Van Steenwyk again for responding. This is a conversation that needs to take place, because the current nebulous definitions floating about are not serving the interests of our culture. We need to better define the unacceptable other to stay true to a better idea of ourselves.

 
Towards a Better Definition of Terrorism
I had the misfortune of being subjected to my service's definition of terrorism this last weekend. It was long, meandering, and generally incomprehensible. I will not repeat it here because some of you may be about to operate vehicles or heavy machinery, and I wouldn't want to expose you to a narcolepsy attack. I remarked to a shipmate that the definition was execrable and resolved to do better. Here is what I came up with:

Terrorism: A pious fraud that uses conspicuous acts of violence to steal notoriety unearned by merit or innovation.

I am very interested in improving on this and actively solicit your input. I would really prefer to keep it concise and as simple as possible.

 
And If Enough Troops Had Won?

The "Not Enough Troops" crowd, dubbed the NETties because they are so tedious to have earned a label, are compulsively picking at the past again. Apparently they believe that packing 400K troops into a narrow front and advancing them in a coherent manner in a limited timeframe is simplicity itself. I wonder if any of these people have ever stood around and waited for a complex military evolution to go forward in a narrow timeframe. I really doubt that any of these NETties have ever tried to make a complex military evolution move forward in a timely manner.

Nevertheless, here is my take:

If we had destroyed the Iraq insurgency immediately, the global supporters of terrorism would have stopped backing that front and moved their efforts elsewhere. As it stands, the bulk of anti-western terrorist funding and activity is being directed towards Iraq, where we have prepared troops and a secure logistics chain.

We have found and fixed the enemy's attention and are routinely capturing and destroying them. We have grasped them firmly by the nose and are kicking their asses soundly. This process is not always pretty and it is by no means perfect, but we are mangling the enemy's capacity and will to fight. What part of this constitutes a failure to plan or execute? Why should we agree to shift the fight away from ground of our choosing where we are winning?

I would rather fight this fight in the hot, dirty, stinky, and distant place it currently resides than wait for it to come to my home. I really like keeping the war distant from my wife and family, and I'm willing to put up with hot, dirty, stinky, and…refreshing malted beverage deprivation penalty to keep things away from them. This location choice is why I raised my hand, and why I go to work on base every day.

 
Bring the Troops and the War Home?

One of the frequent anti-war criticisms is that there is no schedule or guideline for when the troops will come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of the reason there will never be a schedule or list of required accomplishments to trigger a withdrawal is that announcing your intentions in a war is stupid. We do not tell the enemy what our strategic objectives are because we do not want those objectives to be blown up. The acronym for this behavior is "OPSEC" which is short for "Do Not Be An Idiot."

The actual objective of this war, though, is the same as any other war. We are destroying the enemy's will to fight. Unlike previous wars where the enemy had a defined frontier, our current adversary is distributed around the world and in our own backyard. I have worked in the same building as an admitted Al Queda operative. Although our enemies are doing their best to destroy their own support by being really despicable sons of pigs, they are also very resistant to allowing reality to intrude on their thought processes. If it was easy, the war would already be over.

Unless and until we have destroyed the enemy's will to fight, discussions of bringing the troops home are ludicrous. All bringing the troops home does is bring the fight home. Part of being a successful military leader is making the battle take place on your choice of ground. Nobody in his right mind chooses to have a fight in his own home when they have the capacity to fight anywhere else effectively. Ask the French farmers who are still pulling plowing up artillery shells from ninety year old battles, battles should be fought as far from home as you can win them. One of the nice things about being the United States is that we can win battles a long way from home.

I am really sorry that a lot of decent people in Iraq are suffering for living where the United States can most effectively bring our enemies to battle. The only consolation I can give them is that we're using the minimum and most accurate force necessary to win the war. Part of that is keeping our troop levels down to the point where we can rotate them out frequently, so that they will be rested and trained. What a lot of people who claim to be concerned for the Iraqi's or winning the war don't understand when they call for more troops is that large numbers of exhausted troops does not mean that you can win the war more effectively. A lot of amateurs fail to comprehend the impact of endurance on military effectiveness.

About fifty years ago an American historian, S.L.A. Marshall, codified the rule of military endurance: fatigue is exactly equal to fear. When you get tired, you get afraid. When you get afraid, you get tired. Something else that factors in here is that exhaustion and fear also make you stupid. If we had gone in two years ago with all the troops in the US military and they were still there, our troops would be constantly exhausted and making stupid mistakes. By keeping our numbers down to where we can rotate regularly, we minimize our own mistakes. OK, everybody gets tired and makes mistakes, but the kind of routine grinding exhaustion experienced in previous wars is an unnecessary sacrifice we are avoiding making in this war. Combat fatigue is not something you hear a lot about in this war, that is not an accident.
It is hard to change the public perception of the military, and I'm not just saying that because I'm sick to death of hearing buggery in the Navy jokes. (It's really offensive to me when people tell me that I tolerate sexual assault in my workplace just because they read it happened centuries ago.) One of the misapprehensions that is functioning right now is the notion that bringing the troops home will mean and end to the conflict. While it is traditional for the war to be over when one side withdraws, we have no mechanism in this conflict to negotiate such a settlement. The enemy has shown abundant willingness to attack anywhere without a shred of compassion. Currently we have been able to focus the bulk of the struggle away from our homes, where we can fight most effectively, although this is at the expense of the Iraqi people.

It would be an impeachable offense for President George W. Bush to allow that struggle to refocus in the United States. Returning the troops before the enemy's will to fight has been substantially destroyed is a violation of the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That is just not going to happen with George W. Bush, if for no other reason than his opponents in Congress would impeach him in a moment. Talk of bringing the troops home is just noise, because nobody is talking about bringing a campaign of terrorist violence to their own neighborhoods. The troops will stop deploying when the enemy abandons their efforts to restore a global caliphate. Breaking the enemy's imperialistic design may take some more decades, but making noise about impossible returns won't speed that up.

 
Memorial Day Camping
Abigail and I went camping with Michael Totten this weekend. The trip to the Alvord Desert wiped Abigail out and the thundershower on Saturday night was a bit trying, but altogether we had a very nice time.

Here I am in the Alvord. Photo Courtesy of Michael Totten using my camera. I'm holding his (soon to be retired) camera.

Here is Michael in the Alvord, doing his famous book jacket pose. Now if we can get him to write the freaking book...

Sunday after Michael went home to tend his wife and her injured ankle, we went scouting for additional campsites in and about the Malheur National Forest that we had missed on our previous trip. The forest covers over a million acres, and I doubt that we've covered even a third of the available campsites after two scouting trips. We did find one marvelous camping area, and it was deserted during the busy weekend. Where is it? That would be telling.



In Prairie City, we saw what Memorial Day means in flyover country. They do it right and understand that it matters. The clouds and looming mountain really affected me, but not as much as the sincerity of the locals in their support of their war dead.

 
Averting the Triumph of Fear

A friend called to confirm my email address so she could invite me to her graduation party and I stole some of her time to catch up. Her reaction was to recount how her cousin's presence in Baghdad caused her aunt to worry. I reassured her that our troops were more highly valued by their commanders than any in history and that our equipment was so very, very good. She went away from the conversation unconvinced, I suspect.

Upon reflection I realized that she was clinging to fear as the most ascendant of moral postures. What a shame it would be to abandon ourselves to fear, merely because it is the most sustainable of emotions. You can always talk yourself into being afraid, and the unhealthier you are, the more readily your fear is reinforced. The more you are afraid, the more you can be afraid.

The strange thing about this in absolute terms is how strong she is in other aspects of her life. She is a good mother to two children. She has a healthy, loving relationship with a wonderful husband. She is involved in cultural activities on a regular basis within the community. She is scientifically knowledgeable and aware. Her professional life is regularly changing and quite prosperous.

What a damn shame that in order to adhere to her political party's guidance, she must live her life in fear instead of accomplishment. What a waste of her political awareness, to spend it on fear of everything that might reflect well on the domestic political opposition.

 
Michael Totten Back from Beirut

Getting the story straight from a blogger is a lot like drinking beer right at the brewery. Drinking beer at the brewery while a blogger tells you the story is a lot like what I just did after picking up Michael Totten at the airport. The fresh story from Beirut is going to have elections, but it looked like a close thing for a while. Michael is a bit shocky right now, so I don't know if he'll be blogging tonight. ("Bit shocky", defined as the way that traveling halfway around the world, twenty-three hours in a jet leaves you. Spending a month in Beirut on the cusp of a revolution was the cherry on the top of that particular cake.)

Because he's Michael, he was still coherent. I threatened that a bit by greeting him at the airport by waving a Lebanese flag in his face after he got out of the international flight corridor. He says that for a moment he thought that the plane had flown in a big loop. He was very surprised that I could get a Lebanese flag in Portland. They are flying the flags practically everywhere in Beirut, Hezbollah controlled areas excepted. I gave him the flag, since I thought he deserved a trophy for his collection.

 
The Christmas Cabin

I remember the Christmas of 1970 extremely well because that was the year we built our first building on the Bandon property. A lot of good reasons were behind our decision to create a new home in the woods. Mom and Dad had decided that living in Los Angeles was killing us and that the kids needed to grow up someplace healthy. Katy had asthma and LA's air was killing healthy people. Law enforcement types were expressing their appreciation for my father's activism by planting drugs in his campus ministry office safe to discover in raids. Mother participation in the teacher's strike made her continued employment as a substitute doubtful. Since Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa all had skill at living in the country, getting out made a lot of sense. After a lot of searching from Marin County to British Columbia, it was decided to settle in Bandon.

As a first step in developing the property, we built the Christmas Cabin. The Christmas Cabin was built so we could have someplace to live while we built the other houses. We learned a lot while building that cabin. I learned that a six-year-old can in fact finish nailing floorboards even when it is very cold and you are very tired and complaining a whole lot. I suspect that Dad also learned that windows are important and that you should have a lot of them. We also learned that you can live in a cabin in the woods and be grateful for the shelter.

At the end of the Christmas break, we went back to LA, but not for long. That spring my grandparents went back to Bandon and built their house. Truman V. Lasswell was a formidable man with a keen eye for practical solutions. He built the smaller house as a snug cabin for my Grandma, Mildred Lasswell by himself, using the Christmas Cabin as a base. Although that house might not seem like much by today's McMansion or triple-wide trailer standards, for a man in his sixties and his crippled wife working without nail guns, I think it's pretty good.

When school ended, we moved into the Christmas Cabin while we built the house. That summer is quite a story of its own, but for another time. Later the cabin served as a guest house for our other friends who were escaping from California induced madness. After all of our friends who were going to get out, got out, we used the cabin for storage. But the Christmas Cabin always had a special place in our hearts for the shelter it provided for us and the proof that we could live out in the woods on Bill's Creek Road.

 
What Is More Cool

Yesterday at the office we had a little talk about the potential for a NASCAR track in Portland. (If you are male and in the Navy and let folks know you aren't interested in NASCAR, you are in violation of the "don't tell" policy.) My new unit has a young man on the permanent staff who mentioned the NASCAR driver who is 18 years old. "He gets out of high school and goes straight to driving at NASCAR, what could be more cool than that?"

Today I found something very cool. Attached to my reserve center is a pier that the reserve destroyers used to moor to. For the last ten years a group of retired Navy veterans has been restoring a WWII PT boat there. I met these gentlemen today while talking to them about moving some equipment on the pier so we could set up some of my unit's gear for an upcoming drill. I had a few minutes, and a remarkably spry retired Captain showed me the PT boat's original Packard engines…the only ones of their kind on a restored boat in the world. The Captain then introduced me to the gentlemen who have been working on this project for the last decade.

The PT boat looked in great condition, and I've been around enough boats and ships to know what a taught vessel looks like. Some work still needed to be done, but I could tell that a lot of effort had been made to restore this sixty year old "disposable" craft. Engines don't gleam like that because of good intentions. I've been interested in PT boats since I first got fascinated by WWII, thirty years ago. I know that I've missed some serious promises I made to my ten year old self, but standing on the deck of a real PT boat today fulfilled a big one.

So here are a bunch of old guys, some of them in their eighties, working at the end of a pier to restore a boat. It gets cold out on the end of that pier, and I can feel it in my bones at forty. The thing is that some of these guys sailed on boats like this one as young men, and they helped to change the world. They survived that war, and possibly one or two more, which makes them the carriers of some very important knowledge. Before their days end they are getting out of the house, putting up with the aches of a damp Oregon spring chill, and doing their part to make sure that future generations don't forget the contributions of their fellows or the lessons they learned.

To be able to make that kind of contribution, to have something that important to do, and to still be able to make it to the end of the pier after a very full life is a hell of a lot more cool than being young and supremely gifted at making high-speed left turns. Plus the PT boat has got to be a chick magnet! Well, for chicks who dig Benny Goodman anyhow.

P.S. Am I going to print out this post and give it to the old guys in the hope that someday they might take me for a ride on their boat? You bet your ass I am! Are they still going to make me clean the bilges to earn the ride? You bet your ass they are! All that damp Oregon spring chill has made those old guys mean.

 
Micheal Totten in Lebanon

What's worse, it was my idea! Okay, Michael told me he wanted to go there a whole lot and that his regular contacts weren't interested in sending him there. I told him to pitch the idea to Jim Hake at Spirit of America since the Iraq election coverage had gone so well. While Michael was working up his pitch, Jim called and asked if he wanted to go... So maybe I just did my part to help synchronicity, but I did my part.

Michael is a very good thinker, but lacks some of the chrome-plated chutzpah a freelancer needs to really milk publishers. Since chutzpah is something I have no shortage of, I'm helping him out by sharing some of mine. I still think he should have submitted the "conference expenses" to Sean just to shake the money tree. We did spend most of that "conference" discussing business. Other people would think it was just a couple of hawkish bloviators spending a night drinking, but Sean is perspicacious enough to know a legitimate business expense when he sees it!

Check out what Michael is doing there, and pray for a peaceable transition.

 
Terri Schiavo Post

The last several decades of the encroachment of human habitation in the West has meant a reduction in the range of feral equines. As of the most recent census, there are not enough wild horses in the whole United States to drag me out from cover on this topic. That is all, carry on.

 
Kentucky National Guard MP's Kick Ass, Take Names…

Defending the convoys carrying the goods to fight the war is hard, thankless, and critical work. Yesterday a unit of Kentucky Guard Military Police did the job magnificently.

At approximately noon on March 20, 26 terrorists were killed, seven wounded, and one captured when they attacked a coalition force convoy on the outskirts of Baghdad in the Salman Pak area. Seven soldiers were injured during the attack. A U.S. military convoy and its security element from the 617 Military Police Company was patrolling when the convoy was ambushed by approximately 40 – 50 terrorists with rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire. The convoy became disabled and the 617 MP’s maneuvered to flank the terrorists. Apache air support was called in but didn’t participate in the engagement. The Apache remained in the area to provide additional support if needed.

Military personnel recovered six RPG launchers, 16 RPG rockets, 13 RPK (machine guns), 22 AKMs (assault rifle), more than 2900 rounds of ammunition, and 40 hand grenades from the terrorists.

Every day soldiers guard convoys across Iraq’s most dangerous roads. In recent days, this road has had increased attacks on coalition forces. On March 18, there was another complex attack at almost the same location. The attack consisted of RPGs, mortars, and small arms fire from both sides of the road. No U.S. soldiers were injured in this attack.

To keep the hundred and thirty thousand troops supplied requires us to move millions of ton-miles every day and this is utterly critical to doing the job right. Responding to an ambush is hard, and requires great skill and coordination to do right.

Yesterday, a bunch of Bluegrass State MP's woke up, put on their boots, and said, "I'm gonna rip the ass off the next sumbitch who takes a shot at me." They then proceeded to do that very thing. Kentucky Guard: HOOAH!

 
If you are not reading Free Iraqi, you should now. Ali is doing a lot to put things into perspective for the wildly mixed fight we find ourselves in the middle of. His latest is a long post, but his has been a long journey.

 
Open Letter to the Navy Exchange

To Whom It May Concern:

I recently returned to the Naval Reserve after leaving the Navy almost ten years ago. A health issue which has recently cleared up kept me from rejoining. This weekend I attended my first (indoctrination) drill and got my ID card. It feels like I have been on the bench for three and a half years and now I can actually contribute. Today was my first chance to make up for lost time and expedite my acquisition of uniforms so I can start training with my unit. My wife and I got up at four this morning in Portland to make the trek up to the Puget Sound area in what I expected to be a grueling day of searching all the exchanges in the area for the uniform items I would need to drill.

The first base we went to had a pass office so crowded that I was sure we would be hours waiting to go to the exchange, so we diverted to the Bangor, Washington Naval Station. The pass office at Bangor was polite and after we were passed through their excellent security, we made our way to the uniform store on that base. What we found was the friendliest, most professional and efficient uniform store I have ever had the privilege to shop in.

After wandering around the store for a bit to get my bearings, I found some of the items I needed for my camouflage uniform, and then I went to look for the hard to find accessories. To my complete surprise, everything I needed was there! To my complete delight, I was found by the store manager, Sandy. She asked me what I needed and I explained my situation. I was especially concerned about the amount of time it would take to get name tapes made for my uniform, since your web site had indicated it would take 10 business days plus shipping time for me to get them online. That seemed to cause her some concern for her organization's ability to provide support to their customers. She appeared to decide to demonstrate exactly how efficiently a well run Navy Exchange uniform store can be. Instead of two weeks, my wife and I were out the door with the uniform I needed to participate in my unit training in two hours.

I have been away from the service for quite some time, and my wife has never been a part of the military community before. Sandy and Shelly, the uniform store supervisor, took care of us. My previous experience with the treatment of reservists in the distant past was that we were not full participants in the defense of the nation. Sandy, Shelly, and the tailoring staff made my wife and I feel like we were contributors to our nation's defense, worthy of the full measure of the Navy Exchange's support. More than that, they made me feel like my family was coming home to the Navy.

Thank you for your excellent service,

Patrick S Lasswell, STG2(SW), USNR

 
The Demise of the Tantrum Tyranny

The ink-stained heroes of Iraq have shown the Middle East the way to courageous liberty. It remains to be seen how far and how well their example will be matched, but initial signs are that the Arab peoples have a tremendous hunger for freedom. At the same time, other despots are getting overthrown. For far too long, the politically correct in the west have used victim psychology to extort results. As long as they were willing to throw a tantrum, they could never be wrong. Ideas could be denounced by the simple expedient of screaming in emotional distress over how unfair it was to be shown as wrong. I first noticed this behavior in college more than twenty years ago.

By investing so totally in opposing the war, the politically correct burned their bridges behind them. Now they have been repudiated by millions of people accept the role of powerless victim. The Iraqi voters who risked so much more than emotional meltdown have utterly shamed the useless extortionists. The failure of the union of obstructionist whiners to deliver results was explainable only as long as they could block anyone else from accomplishing anything. Now that some thing real has been done and results can clearly be seen, we can let them cry all they want. No longer will intellectuals be bound by the strictures of the tantrum tyranny.

H/T: Who Knew

 
Thank you for telling SFC Salie's story

Mr. Galloway,

Thank you for your continued service of telling the military's stories with honesty, understanding, and grace.

I found your story through a blog of a soldier's wife whose husband is still in Iraq. I was not aware that you were still reporting and would like to be able to follow whatever you have to report. Do you have a web site or blog where your stories are centrally linked? I would very much like to add any such site to my own blogroll, and I'm sure that many other military bloggers would, too.

If you are without a website and have any interest in starting such a project, I am sure that there are a lot of people who would want to give you assistance for the honor of working with you. I cannot recommend my own web skills because they are so slim.

Thank you again for your work,

Patrick S Lasswell
STG2(SW), USNR
Portland, OR

UPDATE: Chutzpah is its Own Reward!

OK, maybe getting a response from a writer after you ask for help promoting his work is not a cause for celebration. Nevertheless, Joe Galloway is worthy of respect and attention. In an era when it is almost impossible to find reporters who get the real story filed, let alone the details right, this reporter keeps doing the job right. We live free because brave men risk much, and Joe Galloway tells their stories well. Here is what he sent:

patrick:
thanks for the kind note. i have about four fulltime jobs at present, to include sr. military correspondent for knight ridder newspapers, my weekly syndicated column thru tribunemedia services, on road doing speeches every weekend, and gen moore and i are starting to work on a sequel to WWSOAY.
my columns and stories can be followed by going to:
www.krwashington.com then click on link ujnder my photo on lower r. side of page. that takes you to my website, and you can capture the URL there.
happy hunting.
joe galloway

Have I mentioned how much I think of the man who flew into the Valley of Death because that's where the story was? His link is here.

 
On Returning to Service


In 1987, I joined the active Navy with the belief that our nation needed to be strong to stay free. In 1991, I re-enlisted in the Navy with the expectation that our country would lead the world in building freedom everywhere. In 1995, I left the Navy with the realization that our political leadership would rather be stable than help others be free. In 2001, I was sure that I could never serve again due to my failing health. Last year there was a real chance that our country would abandon its responsibilities abroad.

Ten years ago I was exhausted with the endless cycle of "gotcha" military inspections that served primarily to further the careers of the inspectors. This was during a time of reduction and destructive introspection as the political leadership of the country did whatever it could to ignore its responsibilities to act in the world. Initiatives to empower the individual in the service to increase performance had been firmly suppressed and the business of the service had been turned over to the politically ambitious bean-counters. I watched them file the edge off the sword to avoid anybody getting hurt. The bombing of the USS Cole cannot be described as a surprise because the "business as usual" mentality made it so inevitable.

Four years ago I was exhausted due to diminished thyroid output slowly killing me. When the thyroid gives out, the body slows down, becomes susceptible to disease, mimics depression with astonishing accuracy, and puts on weight. If my wife Abigail had not been part of my life, I do not know what I would have done. With her support, I had something to live and become well for. I love you very much Abigail, thank you.

Perhaps it is my own personal bugaboo, but I was terrified of being caught again with a one-term President's accomplishments being abandoned in the name of stability. One of the things that make all the indignities of the service worthwhile is the chance to accomplish something meaningful. I had the option of holding back my service until I was sure that it would at least have the chance of touching upon lasting significance. It is clear now that the will of the United States is to seek stability through freedom. After the glorious bravery of millions of ink-stained Iraqi heroes, the chances of America abandoning responsibility for the siren call of expedience seem remote. We are tied to the mast and steering clear of the rocks.

Today I am rested, well, and can again contribute to my nation as we act responsibly in the world again. This is the last post I will make without censoring myself in the interests of the service. I love my country and I love my wife. I am returning to service with a clear conscience and the determination to do right by both of them. By serving, I am doing my part to make sure that my wife has a better world to live in.

 
Torture, Control, and the Slippery Slope

"Well, professional Warriors DO NOT ESTABLISH EXIT STRATEGIES, WE ACHIEVE AN END STATE!" Major General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., USMC

Six years ago I was in the lobby at a literary convention when an editor friend was assaulted from behind by some twit. The twit covered my friend's eyes and played a "Guess Who" game that would be annoying coming from a charming seven-year-old, but was infuriating coming from a snide twenty-something. It turned out that the maturity challenged one was a dinner guest and I needed to put my fury over the incident away. Late that night I was manning the programming desk when the I was called me in some distress to ask for help in defusing one of the worst dinner parties in history. The snide twit had gone out with the Editors and an author friend of mine. My author friend is a great writer and a very hard man, a proven two-percenter. Over the dinner, the twit had acted out his nature, and proceeded to infuriate my friend to the point where he felt it necessary to choke the life out of the manipulative little bastard. Cooler heads prevailed, no assault charges were filed, and in trying to talk the recipient of harsh treatment down, I discovered that he had been abused as a child.

Since that rather too exciting evening, I came to the conclusion that the twit had never won any kind of honest fight in his life. His way of controlling situations and people is to manipulate them. It looked and sounded to me like he gets a special thrill in manipulating people to the point where they get angry at him. The ultimate indicator of control for him is when people are infuriated to the point of assaulting him. I think that at some point in his life he saw a slippery slope and dove down it headfirst, trying to drag as many with him as he possibly could. What a loser.

What got my goat over this individual and his behavior is not so much that he was immature, manipulative, and selfish but that he claimed that he was justified afterwards. The echoes of that annoying little man I heard in the claims of the Abu Gharib guards left me cold. Something ignored by the selective attention of the media in their portrayal of the disgraceful events of one evening, is that the photographs revealed no softening techniques ever used by military interrogators. The enthusiasm on the faces of those soldiers was not the zeal of dutiful interrogators; that was the sick excitement of control freaks bullying those under their control. That glee is our enemy.

If America has any lingering contribution to world history, it is our unique perspective on power and responsibility. The United States of America exists as an expression of individual rights. From George Washington's magnificent retirement to the maintenance of constitutional democracy to the current questioning of the Washington governor's race, our identity as Americans continues to be the opposition to regal power. The concept of "my breath is law" is anathema to American identity, and denouncing it is celebrated as the highest expression of citizenship. Muckrakers breaking the Oil Trusts, Eliot Ness bringing onetime lord of Chicago Al Capone to justice, bloggers bringing down CBS and CNN's leadership all are examples of speaking purifying truth to corrupting regal power with effect instead of affectation. Regardless of need, abusing prisoners is a control method that violates our ideals because it imposes regal power.

What distinguishes Tomás de Torquemada is not his viciousness, but his openness. The Spanish Inquisition operated as an open activity, known by all, and they are remembered for it. The faceless villains of Lubyanka who have more blood on their hands more recently are forgotten because the KGB had a functional reign of terrified silence and the complicity of the western press. If the Orange Revolution in Ukraine tells us anything, it is that the days of an invisible Lubyanka are over. In our operational environment, we must face the reality that cell phone text messaging, omnipresent digital cameras, and weblogs have eliminated the possibility of covert behavior staying covert. To make things tougher for torturers hoping to be forgotten is that data storage capacity is growing exponentially.

Torture is a control measure antithetical to the ideals of the United States of America. When Americans envision successful conflict, we are the ones stopping torture. In the main, this is an accurate vision. For every actual lapse cited by our detractors, there are dozens of verifiable incidents where Americans are literally leading the charge to save those oppressed, persecuted, and in peril. Regrettably, for every actual lapse our detractors imply and imagine a thousand more. The calculus of torture in the age of the internet has to include the consequence that the act will be remembered forever and distributed everywhere.

This matters because the United States is not solely engaged in fighting the battle of Iraq or Afghanistan; we are fighting to win the War on Terror. Any decision to abuse a prisoner must be weighed not just against the operational reality of the immediate situation, but against the lasting impact of the act on our national image. It is not merely our foreign detractors refusing to assist us because of allegations of torture, but the effect on our own national will that must be kept in mind. We have accomplished more in Afghanistan and Iraq than any military of any size at any time in history has, but all of that was put in dire jeopardy due to some idiot prison guards having a birthday party one night and taking pictures of humiliated prisoners to impress somebody's girlfriend.

If you find the ticking atomic bomb under Grand Central Station, is the world going to ignore the wounds of the guy who told you about it? Certainly. Anything less than that large and that imminent a threat is going to be questioned severely, and for good reason. Engaging in a pattern of indiscriminate prisoner abuse will be found out and will lose this war and maybe the next one, too. Acts of prisoner abuse must be measured against the requirement to achieve an end state instead of accepting an exit strategy.

Hat Tip: All the people who left comments and analyzed my earlier posts.

 
Thank You for Your Links

I would like to thank everybody who linked me. The wonders of trackback magic are a mystery to me, mostly because I am far too lazy to learn them.

First, I want to thank Captain Van Steenwyk for his inspiration and analysis. He is continuing to follow this subject and I look forward to discussing it with him more. I especially value his experience controlling psychiatric patients, and having served in a National Guard light infantry unit, understand what a great contribution his experience is for a commander. I agree with his conclusion that dead prisoners detract from the mission.

I would like to point out that the unit corpsman for the SEAL team did not meet the standards of his unit on other grounds, and that may have contributed to the demise of al-Jamadi. I have served aboard a ship with a messed up doc. Even on units as large as a frigate (company sized) in peacetime operations, when your doc is bad, the ship is hurting. We were lucky in that our baby doc (junior corpsman) HM3 Mike Fiore was stellar, and he stepped up to the plate big time. Mike if you're out there, come to Portland and dinner is on me.

Matthew Heidt honored me greatly by taking me seriously. He pointed out several key limitations of my article and gave me a lot to think about. As a SEAL, he knows the stresses I tried to describe better than I want to. He pointed out that experience with stress does not give you x-ray vision for hard men. He also noted that even SEALs are vulnerable to "blindside" stress, the stuff that nobody can prepare you for. One of the things I am trying to address with this potentially endless series of posts on torture is that the nature of deliberate abuse can cause all kinds of "blindside" stress.

Which leads me to somebody who called themselves Red River who talked about some serious issues in comments, but felt that he could not leave accurate contact information? If this was a dog-blogging post I might take umbrage, but since this topic is so damn taboo, I have to value the need for discretion. I was about to say something about not having met the kinds of enemy the SEALs are facing, but I went to college with them and worked with Mike Hawash at Intel. My primary concern is not the enemy, but the lingering effects of handling them abusively.

Somebody is going to abuse a prisoner for information and they are going to get caught. This war on terror is not going to go away any time soon, and this is going to happen. Regardless of the value of the information extracted, somebody is going to go to a court martial, and eventually we are going to see one of our best people make a mistake and be hung for it. This result is of value to the enemy because it will mess up our operations and get a bunch of people who do not understand up in arms. Deferring this event to 2038 or much later is in the Nation Interest of the United States. Al-Jamadi may well have been working to inflict as much damage as he could to our side once he was captured by getting himself beaten to death. The enemy's actions and intentions are externalities you and I have no control over, all we own is our decisions.

Cancerman, thank you for the explaining the book answers. This has a place in the discussion and I should have put something about that down, but the post was too long already.

Kit Lange, thank you for keeping one Marine off the streets and out of the pool halls. My mother did that very thing, and it seemed to work for her for more than fifty years. I suggest very strongly that you study stress management as if your life depended on it, because it does. My mother never had the tools to deal with the kinds of things my dad was going through, and although she did magnificently well with what she had, there were some spectacularly rough patches. You have access to a lot of tools, and will get access to more soon. When you get married, I strongly suggest you find the healthiest military wife you can and study her in earnest.

Right up until I wrote the above paragraph, I never understood why all the exchanges had such an extended selection of china. It bugged me for a lot of years, because I was always single when I was in the service, and the selection of useful tools for servicemen in the exchange was so damn limited. Now I get it, china is a stress management tool for military wives. Military husbands have a more prosaic term for this tool: ammunition. My lovely wife admonishes me to be careful about this joke…proving my thesis.

UPDATE:
For those unclear on the concept of the penalties associated with getting caught abusing prisoners, please read my friend Michael Totten's Tech Central Station article.

A Syrian friend of mine immigrated to the US two years ago. He and I occasionally have good-natured arguments about foreign policy. Some time ago during one of our conversations I promised him that the US and British troops would be kind to the people of Iraq, that we wanted only the best for them. Then came what Christopher Hitchens rightly called a moral Chernobyl: allegations of abuse and even torture in Abu Ghraib prison with the accompanying photos of smiling sadistic soldiers and guards.

It wasn't as bad as watching Al Qaeda snuff films or video shot inside Iraqi prisons under Baath Party management. But it was bad. Real bad.

 
Torture and the Two Percent Military

This is a long post, but it deals with a complex topic that needs to be addressed. Please bear with me and read the whole thing. I have been considering this matter for some months and consider this to be the an extension of earlier posts.

One of the secrets the military doesn't talk about very much is that roughly two percent of the troops are stone cold stress-proof machines. These folks just don't break like regular people do, and when you put them together in groups, they break even less. Don't get me wrong, everybody breaks, but these guys routinely operate in stress environments that destroy other military personnel.

I have had the pleasure of knowing a number of these folks, the wisdom of never pretending to be one, and the honor of being accepted as a pleasant nuisance in their company. Possibly the latter is due to my willingness to provide them with drinks and keep my mouth shut...okay, probably. Their company is desirable because they have amazing stories that are frequently true, their heads are out of their asses at (almost) all times, and they establish a sense of comfortable belonging when people are not screaming at them. They are really great to have as friends, largely because they deeply understand loyalty.

The toughness that the two percenters have is what most of the elite organizations are trying to select for, and that they mostly accomplish. I say mostly because the prestige of the organizations that select for the two percenters is so high that they attract a god-awful number of wanna-be's, and no selection process is perfect. Too often people with more ambition than wisdom get into positions they have no capacity to deal with. Too often people with a lot of ambition worship form and ignore substance, and regrettably, the military is bad at dealing with this specific problem. War…conflict…tends to sort this problem out, but it frequently tends to do so by killing off or screwing up not just the idiot, but also everybody around him. Currently, SEAL Team Seven [Corrected] is facing this problem, due to a person who couldn't maintain the standards of teamwork essential to SEAL operations, and I will get into this more later.

I believe it is true that the will of the United States is to not accept a military that tortures. The US population…more importantly the US electorate…needs to believe that there are no atheists in foxholes and no Americans running torture chambers. This has nothing to do with the capacity of the two percenters to deal with torture in a professional manner. Quite frankly, the capacity hurt people without lingering effect on your own psyche is the ultimate selector for the two percenters. The ones who can deal with the stress of deliberately and with professional malice causing harm on a human being and still be capable of healthy human interaction afterwards are the real two percenters. People like this exist, and some of them are my friends.

The Catch-22 of this situation is that while there are people who can responsibly and effectively obtain information through torture, regardless of the beliefs of the electorate, there really is no capacity in the US military to compose a meaningful doctrine on torture. The kinds of stress that is used to select for the two percenters is painful to consider; rational minds shy away from thinking about that much suffering, even though the process is invariably voluntary. Getting a reasoned discussion about imposing physical stress is extremely difficult because the topic starts with nightmares. Getting people to let go of their own horror and talk intelligently is something that just is not happening, and is one real limitation of a free country. Civilian control of the military is essential to lasting freedom, but it interferes with this capacity of the most capable fighting men on the planet.

The next absurdity that our military faces is that because torture is forbidden, our capacity to deal with torture resistant enemy fighters is marginalized. Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by elements of SEAL Team 2 in October, 2003 and died in captivity after resisting control. Manadel al-Jamadi was suspected of being instrumental in the bombing of International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters. The SEALs who captured him have been accused of deliberately beating the al-Jamadi to death. This accusation comes from a corpsman assigned to the team who was caught stealing from his teammates. I learned in my First Responder course that the human body can be incredibly fragile, and that you can kill somebody through improper handling of a patient. I have no difficulty believing that someone with the sick will to blow up a Red Cross HQ would also have the will to resist being subdued so strongly that death was more likely than unconsciousness.

It is also important to remember that our opponents in the current war have no freedom imposed limitations on respecting humanity, and in fact have extensive experience both in torture and resisting torture. This is one skill that the terrorists value highly and they have shown great determination and success in relating it to their disciples. Manadel al-Jamadi would laugh louder than the flames of hell right now to see the confusion his death has caused his enemies by successfully resisting control. Partly this is due to the philosophical underpinnings of the Islamist movement that values resistance very highly. It is also due to the large number of the sick bastards who follow Islamism having spent time in some of the worst prisons in the world.

Another consideration in this mess is that while the US military has a strong commitment to remaining drug free, our enemies suffer no such limitations. Any detainee captured in the field can be higher than a kite on hashish and amphetamine cocktails to help him resist interrogation. Subduing through chemical means is not an option for detainees who are on unknown dosages of unknown drugs. Administering enough opiates to calm a detainee at the peak of a methamphetamine high is also administering enough opiates to kill him when the speed wears off. Enough pepper spray to burn through a hashish buzz is also enough pepper spray to cause anaphylactic shock.

The quickest doctrinal solution to this intractable problem is to load SEAL teams and others with more junk to assist in the physical restraint of resisting prisoners. This is a monumentally bad idea because it violates two working principles of current US doctrine; KISS and speed of action. "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is the principle that the less you have to forget, the less you will forget. Extra gear, beyond what experience has shown to be necessary is just something else to get in the way of the mission. Additionally, our troops are already carrying body armor to keep them alive, enough ammunition to fight their way out of the inevitable ambush, water to keep them effective and medical supplies to deal with the inevitable IED wounds. Adding more gear slows down our troops and makes them more vulnerable because they take longer to accomplish their mission and return. Wire ties and sandbags may not be the highest expression of prisoner control, but they are light, available, and work.

Every other refinement or addition to current doctrine has to face the real world scrutiny in the field. Sometimes these changes work well, like using heavy armor in urban warfare worked in Second Fallujah. Sometimes these changes get our people killed. Regrettably, journalists have shown themselves incredibly poorly equipped to lead a discussion on this or any other military topic. Academics have done their best to show journalists as respectable by way of being utterly irresponsible and untouchable behind walls of tenure, so their contributions cannot be expected to add to any discussion on the boundaries of torture.

Where does this leave the two percent military? The old adage, "cheat but don't get caught" has shown its frailty possibly due to the expansion of Special Forces operations and personnel. This is a serious problem, and I don't have a ready answer. I suspect that the decision to handle the death of Manadel al-Jamadi as a Non-Judicial Punishment (NJP) matter instead of a Court Martial is probably wise. While Court Martial's make better headlines, NJP makes better changes in an operational military.

A deeply grateful Hat Tip to Jason Van Steenwyk for a post let me finish this.

 
If Rebecca Threw the Race, Who Could Blame Her?

Watching The Amazing Race last night, I was struck by how poised, intelligent, and considerate Rebecca was. Looking over the season, it is utterly clear how much she valued love and how little her partner was capable of giving. It looks to me that after the fight at the train station in Sri Lanka, she continued to race, but stopped trying to win. The other couples in the race at that point loved each other, and I honestly think that she decided to give it to one of them. The point where she showed her hand? When she unlocked the lock moments after Hayden and Aaron gave up. That was not a coincidence.

The only reason I am publishing this speculation at all is that the other half of her team cannot say that she sabotaged the team any worse than he did. At almost every significant event where teamwork was called for, Adam invested substantial amounts of time and energy dumping on his team. The mental cruelty routinely inflicted by Adam on Rebecca is in no way indicative of a person engaged in the process of winning a contest involving teamwork.

Rebecca, if you made that choice, I support you in it. I have told my wife that if we are fortunate enough to get on the race, my relationship with her is worth more to me than the prize offered. I can certainly understand that Rebecca could value love enough to make the same choice, inverted. All of the final five couples were in love with each other, save hers. Rebecca is a deeply spiritual person who made a spiritual choice to support love in the world. It is a damned shame that she could not do that with the person who she was teamed with.

I really hope Rebecca finds a love worthy of her and that she gets a chance to live as well as she deserves.

 
Earlier Notes on Protest

I have discussed my father and protest earlier. This is my eulogy to dad.

 
The Sweet Sting of Significance!

I was on the rooftop looking down at the protesters in 2001 with Michael as his friends pointed out idiots they personally knew in the crowd of May Day wanna-be's. Growing up in the anti-war movement, I had the chance to learn what kind of protest accomplished change and what accomplished noise. It seems like all the effective, ethical protest organizers have gone away.

My dad burned out from fighting all the good fights, and somewhere along the way lost his faith not just in the movement, but in God Himself. This was not a healthy development for the Reverend Tom Lasswell, and it took him a long time to come to grips with that failure. On the plus side, I was raised with a much healthier theological basis and understood the alchemy of addiction on an instinctive level. Watching dad wean himself from cigarettes, alcohol, and the siren call of protest was an education. The character it took for him to shelter his kids from the ravages of his addictions was a blessing.

My brother and sister are older and had a more sophisticated view of the handful of years between dad quitting smoking, quitting drinking, and his quitting protest. To me it was much simpler; you quit smoking, drinking, and protest when you realize it is destroying you. Quitting an unhealthy addiction is hard, recognizing the addiction as unhealthy is harder. Kate and Michael still cherish their addiction to leftist causes, because they don't see them as addictive derangements.

Two days ago I had an argument with my brother about the failures of the deregulation of the power industry. My brother blamed it on Ronald Reagan in a manner reminiscent of chasing someone through streets of Paris over the theft of a loaf of bread. For reference, the significant legislation on power deregulation occurred in 1978 (PURPA) and 1992 (EPACT). Can you attach a Reagan presidency to either of those dates? My brother surely can, and insists that he can find proof. For my brother, the failure to fully fund AIDS research is the most catastrophic failure of policy of any president in the twentieth century. Don't even get me started on my sister's political reasoning.

I have talked to people who attend these protests, and I am sure that they love the smell of pepper spray exactly the same way I loved the smell of the smoke from my father's Salem's. It comforts them and makes the feel included. I remember asking my father to smoke just so I could smell the scent of him relaxing. I am sure that there are protesters who violently confront the police just so they can feel the sweet sting of significance and bask in the glow of remembered accomplishment. I am sure that they are confident in the justification of their actions because sensory input tells them it is right. They substitute endorphins for accomplishment and go seeking their next hit.

Update:
Thanks to Michael and Final Historian for their links. As usual, Michael wants me to get traffic analysis tool, and as usual I dismiss the notion as insufficiently zen. On the other hand, Michael gets to have drinks with Christopher Hitchens...

 
Ten Million Representative Heroes

To the Oregonian Editors,

Your featured letter Sunday, January 30th, from Kate Mytron asked, "Does anyone think that the results of today's election are going to truly represent the people of Iraq?"

In response, I present ten million heroes who braved suicide attacks and mortar fire to represent themselves to the world. Certainly there were some places where it was simply too dangerous to vote and other problems with the election. But to ignore the courage of millions of ink-stained Iraqi's and let the bombers, snipers, and other butchers run the world is not any way to represent the people of the United States of America.



I congratulate the millions of heroes of Iraq and wish them, in this order, freedom, strength, happiness and the hope of peace.

Patrick S Lasswell

 
Michael Totten Helps Democracy

My friend Michael Totten is taking a couple of weeks off regular blogging to help win the war. By editing the Iraqi's own stories of their struggle to bring democracy to Mesopotamia, he is doing a hero's job. He isn't getting paid and he isn't going to get a medal. But he is getting a link from me, please read this often and point it out to others: Friends of Democracy.

 
Michael Totten Helps Democracy

To the Editors,

Your editorial of January 27, 2005 "Chemical weapons should stay put" is wonderful civics lesson…for those who believe that obstructionism is a civic virtue. For those of us who consider intelligent sacrifice worthwhile, however, your position is frankly despicable. For starters, you take the wrong lesson from history when you remember Tom McCall's principled position to stop the movement of chemical weapons from overseas. Looking at the mechanics of importing chemical weapons from Okinawa in 1970, you are confronted with corrupt and incompetent longshoremen at the docks, badly designed roads to the depot, high numbers of drunk drivers on the road, non-existent hazardous materials handling standards, and conscript weapons handlers at the destination. In 1970, it would not be a question of if, but how many chemical munitions spills would occur. Compared to the situation thirty-five years later, we are talking about quite miniscule risks. The materials handlers are highly paid professionals operating with extremely stringent hazardous materials standards, the materials will travel on best roads in the world, with virtually no drunk driving, and no interaction with a corrupt dockside union.

Additionally, your terrorist scenario is more of a movie script than a serious consideration. In order for a terrorist group to hit the weapons hauling trucks in route, they would have to spend months scouting the routes and familiarizing themselves with the situation. During this time citizens, the local police, FBI, and Army security forces are supposed to be ignoring them? This is not like a foreign national registering for flight school; this is a scary dude acting exactly like a stalker. If they were willing to risk this, they'd be far better off taking potshots with RPG's at railroad chemical tankers which carry greater payloads with much less protection. Your bogeymen do not hold up to scrutiny.

Finally, your position on contributing to the national defense appears to be "Do no more than we are absolutely required to." Just once, why don't you take a higher road and decide that Oregonians can contribute to the nation. Certainly the residents of Colorado and Kentucky would have reason to be grateful. Taxpayers might like to shut down extra weapons depots that are holding these toxic relics instead of paying for the stockpiling of nightmares. Oh, and the Army could certainly use the money to do things like fighting the war and paying the soldiers who are making victory possible a greater fraction of their worth.

By the way, what was the motto of this state? Oh yeah, "The Union." Perhaps you should maintain your editorial stance…just change the title of the paper to, "The Obstructionist?"

 
How to Comment

1. Select the permalink (Timestamp at the bottom of the post.)
2. Select the "Yammer Back at Patrick" link once the individual page comes up.

You'll need to be registered with Blogger, but I don't view that as a hardship, merely spam protection.