Just below, you’ll find a post on the political contours of Gates’ almost-released National Security Strategy. 

I also wanted to tackle the (more important) strategic implications. Again, according to WaPo, the document “calls for the military to master ‘irregular’ warfare rather than focusing on conventional conflicts against other nations, though Gates also recommends partnering with China and Russia in order to blunt their rise as potential adversaries.” 

The Joint Chiefs apparently ”resisted” (Pentagon speak for “hit the roof”) draft versions of the report, but indicated that they were “comfortable” with the final document.  And Michele Flournoy of the Center for a New American Security cautioned against irregular warfare becoming the sole focus of the military.

It won’t be.  Let’s place Gates’ memo in context: the SecDef warns that the US must “master irregular warfare” while trying to manage the rise of potential near-peer military competitors.  This is largely sensible in today’s strategic landscape. 

Gone (for the moment anyway) are convential wars, when nation-states could count on a military-to-military conflict.  Over the medium term, America’s military deployments are likely to resemble the Somalias, Balkans, Iraqs and Afghanistans, rather than D-Day. 

The nature of warfare has devolved along two plains. It has become either the incredibly simple (fertilzer-based IEDs in the Iraqi sand) or the incredibly complex (nuclear proliferation among nation-states).  No country would dare contemplate invading the US, but America’s adversaries are happy drain American public support through insurgency (in Iraq, Afghanistan), or try to even the strategic score by acquiring nuclear weapons (Iran, North Korea). 

Therefore, Gates is advocating a build-up in our weakest capacities while maintaining our strongest and monitoring evolving threats. 

Starting with our strongest capacities, America’s nuclear defense has long-been perfected. Today, it remains strategic insurance from even the most rogue regimes. No nation-state (Iran included) is foolish enough to attack the US or its allies today with a nuclear warhead.  Even the mullahs are rational actors, realizing American retaliation would spell their end. 

Similarly, Russia and China likely do not have the intent or capacity to challenge America’s military dominence over the medium term, and Gates correctly advocates a strategy of integrating these potential rivals.  Should that strategy falter, its not like the US military will have forgotten how to fight regular wars.

But despite vast improvements forced by the challenges of Afghanistan and Iraq, America has not “mastered” irregular warfare. Gates’ memo signals the need to develop a whole-of-government approach to irregular warfare by refining military counterinsurgency strategies and growing corresponding civilian capacities. Inherently, civilian capacities reside outside the Pentagon’s walls, and I wonder how far this memo will go to increase State’s role.   

In the medium term, this is how America will fight. America will continue to monitor potential security threats. When they change, America’s strategies must be flexible enough to meet them.

According to the Washington Post, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is set to release a new National Strategy Review.  It’s not standard practice for a SecDef to issue the document so late in his tenure, but given the tectonic shifts in the nature of threat, warfare, and strategic posturing, Gates foresaw the need to aid the transition to the next administration.  Strategic thinkers from both parties will disagree on sections of the document, but points to Gates for starting the discussion.  That’s why he’s the anti-Rumsfeld.

The document (yet to be released), calls for the military to “master irregular warfare rather than focusing on conventional conflicts,” according to WaPo.  It trumpets the use of soft power in the “long war” against Islamic extremism and says,

Iraq and Afghanistan remain the central fronts in the struggle, but we cannot lose sight of the implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict more complex and diverse than the Cold War confrontation with communism… Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is crucial to winning this conflict [the "long war"], but it alone will not bring victory.”

Let’s consider Gates’ strategy in the context of the presidential race, particularly his note that Iraq and Afghanistan are not the end-game for a secure America.

Frankly, Obama has sounded markedly closer to Gates’ language, saying in a July 15 speech:

As President, I will pursue a tough, smart and principled national security strategy – one that recognizes that we have interests not just in Baghdad, but in Kandahar and Karachi, in Tokyo and London, in Beijing and Berlin. I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

While McCain did call Islamic extremism the “transcendent challenge of our time” in a March speech at the World Affairs Council, it is no secret that he has largely staked his campaign to the success of his Iraq policy.  In a February speech, he initially said “he’d lose” if the public did not accept his position on Iraq, before tempering his remarks: 

Obviously, Iraq will play a role in their [voters'] judgment of my ability to handle national security… But I don’t think there’s any doubt that how they [voters] judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me, my support of the surge. Clearly, I am tied to it to a large degree.”

Could Gates’ National Security Strategy be an trial balloon to his own party?  Is Gates trying publicly explain the new strategic landscape so a McCain administration could not get away with a singular focus on Iraq?

Justice and rationality have prevailed in Turkey. By a razor-thin (and, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks, pre-arranged) margin, the AK Party has prevailed in court. The prosecution fell one vote shy of gaining the required seven (out of eleven) to ban the AK Party and some 70 of its top officials from politics for five years. Had the prosecution succeeded, a constitutional crisis may have evolved and Turkey’s long-held aspirations of joining the EU would have been crushed.

Irony gets a chance to plant its flag in this one. In a world where a Muslim countries are discredited as Middle Eastern Banana Republics due to their religious bent, Turkey - a country that is 99.8 percent Muslim - was nearly tarnished due to its wild secularism. 

However, AKP didn’t get off scott free - the constitutional court gave a nod to the secularists and stripped half of the party’s government funding. The AKP just won a landslide snap election last year, so money will not become a major factor for a while.  However, it could significantly affect the party’s next campaign.  And should the AKP lose thanks to this punishment, the secularists will have had their revenge.

The US, NATO, and the EU need a strong, democratic, moderate Muslim Turkey as a georgraphic and cultural bridge to the Middle East. Look no further than Turkey’s quiet but effective mediation between Israel and Syria.  

Had the prosecution won and a crisis ensued, the old maxim would have held true: you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone. 

As a testament to the dysfunctionality of the American security system, a host of security-minded non-profits, NGOs, and think thanks have sprouted up in the last several years.  The Bush administration has nearly ridden the crazy train off the tracks, and a cadre of smart, qualified thinkers has begun to coalesce around the idea that drastic security reform is necessary in the next administration.  Essentially, its the silver lining to seven years of Bush’s misguided, wasteful, unilateral mess.

Among the best is the the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) - a non-partisan organization dedicated to modernize the American security security system to face 21st century threats.  Of the myriad of organizations playing in this space, PSNR has a clearly defined niche:

The Project will study and define the nature of the problems that inhibit the integration of national power and the consequences of these problems for national security.[T]he Project will develop an array of possible solutions, evaluate those solutions, and then produce recommendations. The Project is focused on the relationships between the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and Cabinet Secretaries rather than on the internal components of departments and agencies.

PNSR issued its initial findings report yesterday, which are summarized below:

 · Frequent feuding and jurisdictional disputes between cabinet secretaries and other agency heads that force the president to spend too much time settling internal fights, waste time and money on duplicative and inefficient actions, and slow down government responses to crises.

· Too much focus by the president and his top advisers on day-to-day crisis management rather than long-term planning, allowing problems to escape presidential attention until they worsen and reach the crisis level.

· An increasing number of political appointees who serve only briefly in top national security posts.

· A budget oversight process in Congress focused on individual agencies, crippling efforts to move quickly to fund emergency operations by multiple agencies.

· A Congress increasingly polarized along political party lines on vital national security issues.

Though this is hardly everything wrong with American security, PSNR has remained focused on its niche and produced a great start.  I look forward to reading their proposed solutions later this year.

Pakistan’s new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, met President Bush at the White House yesterday. 

Following seven years of decidedly mixed results coddling the no-longer all-powerful Pervez Musharraf, the meeting speaks volumes about the new center of power in Pakistan. 

But President Bush still doesn’t seem interested in pushing the Pakistanis to action.  Consider some of these rather bizarre statements:

Mr. Bush praised Pakistan as “a strong ally and a vibrant democracy” and expressed appreciation for “the prime minister’s strong words against the extremists and terrorists.”

“Vibrant democracy” is not what I’d call Pakistan these days, unless you include democracies whose leaders declared a state of emergency and placed their countries under martial lawas recently as November 2007.  That is not to discount the momentous occasion of February’s multi-party elections that saw Musharraf’s party trounced, but let’s apply the “vibrant” tag after five or six free and fair elections. 

Bush’s praise of Gilani’s “strong words against extremists,” cuts to the heart of the problem.  The Bush administration has been letting Musharraf, and now apparently Gilani, talk out of both sides of their mouth about al Qaeda since September 11th.   On the one hand, Pakistani leaders have talked tough in front of American cameras against AQ; but on they other, the Pakistanis ensure domestic tranquility by cutting armistice deals with AQ-supportive tribes in the FATA.  In essence, Pakistani governments of all stripes have guaranteed their survival by promising to leave the FATA alone. 

So “strong words” will not cut it.  President Bush announced $115million in food aid for Pakistan (a paltry sum compared to the $10.5 billion sent since 2001 in military aid).  America should spur the Pakistani government by conditioning aid on its actions - not words - against AQ. 

I wrote last week on Russia’s rather deft diplomacy in recent years.

Over the weekend, the Kremlin kept up the pressure, proposing a new security pact that - though the details haven’t been fully disclosed - would essentially supercede NATO and the OSCE as a broader mechanism for international security dialogue.  With NATO nearly surrounding Moscow, US missile shield construction in Eastern Europe, and two American candidates entertaining the idea of a potentially Russia-less “Concert of Democracies,” it isn’t surprising that the Kremlin wanted to engage the West before Russia is sidelined.

Amongst national security circles in the Beltway and Brussels, there has long been talk of forging new internationial institutions to update or replace current structures.  It is no secret that the UN, NATO, and EU have each long had trouble within their individual frameworks deciding whether, when, and how to act during security crises.  (And for further “light reading,” The Princeton Project has been among the most respected non-partisan works to address the subject.  PPI weighed in on the Princeton Project’s “Concert of Democracies” here.)

Though there’s broad consensus that work must be done, that doesn’t mean that the West will entertain Russia’s proposals.  It’s inconceivable that the Western powers would simply allow Russia to waltz into NATO HQ and define the new rules of international mediation.  And if NATO falls by the wasteside in favor of a pact that includes the Kremlin, then America’s influence inherently wanes.

Russia, of course, knows its proposals will be rejected, but has much to gain by being the first-mover.  With this proposal, Russia signals it wants a seat at the table if dialogue on global institutions does occur, while forcing the West to acknowledge its ascendant power.  If Russia’s proposals are the departure point for institutional reformation, its influence will only rise.

This WaPo article is absolutely fascinating to me.

It runs down some pretty egregious targeting errors in American military efforts over Afghanistan. As tragic as that is, it’s how the military makes these mistakes that stuns me.

As a necessary disclaimer, I am obviously not privy to the particulars of any specific operational intelligence or activities. All of the below is, therefore, fairly-informed speculation.

One of the most significant tragedies the WaPo details is 47 deaths of women and children that occurred when the US errantly bombed a “wedding”.

Here’s the kicker: the term “wedding” is often used amongst terrorist networks as a code word for “attack.”

I shudder to think that the following scenario may have played out:  US intelligence intercepted specific communications between two individuals connected to a terrorist network.  In the intercept, the two operatives mentioned they were attending a “wedding” to occur at a certain date, time, and location.  US intel mistakenly thought the operatives were refering to the execution of a terrorist operation, and decided to take action (most likely by sending in an unmanned drone). 

The drone locates a group of people at that time and place.  It fires, killing 47 men, women, and children who were not part of a terrorist plot, but rather attending an actual wedding.

Perhaps more shocking is that ”wedding” has been well-known as a code word for quite some time and targeting teams should view that term is a red flag that deserves careful evaluation before acting.  Military commands should know to seek corroborative intelligence (best would be a human asset to verify the nuptuals) before using deadly force.