My return + Reservists

Yes, I know, I know...I disappeared for a while. In May, I finally left the National Defense University, where I had worked since December 2012, to join the McCain Institute for International Leadership. I really have no excuse for going away, because since I last blogged, the world has been falling apart: Ukraine and Syria got hotter, Iraq and Gaza got hot again, and the South China Sea looks like it could be next (oh, and Azerbaijan and Armenia are probably going to go to war soon, too, if anyone cares.) Right now, nobody trusts the American government to do the right thing, so Obama is seeking to regain whatever foreign policy credibility he lost with the Syrian "red lines" by raining PGMs down upon the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The irony is that the administration is actually responding to domestic pressures whose existence is dubious, if Pew surveys are any indication: I get the impression that Americans at this point hate Obama's image (like eating burgers while MH17 was shot down) more than they hate his policies. Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria is trying to be the sole voice of hope during a bleak time, but I'm not reassured: I think it's safe to say that 2014 has been a terrible year for world peace. So maybe the currently-fashionable comparisons with 1914 are not really appropriate, but it's hard not to get a little bit downtrodden when one watches CNN or checks their Twitter feed. I think that's part of the reason I didn't want to blog about foreign policy or defense: Too damn depressing.

With so many wars and so little time, it's been hard for me to follow any very closely, but I have continued to pay attention to the situation in Ukraine, even before MH17 was shot down, because I remain curious to see how much the Russian military has improved itself since 2008, which was the subject of a major recurring research project that I worked on at NDU. Now that the Russians are possibly preparing for a ground incursion into Ukraine (admittedly, they didn't go in when they had the chance back in April), it's time to start thinking about all of the ways that it could go wrong, or right. The answer to that question depends upon how far along "New Look" has come, so now is the time to test the thesis of Bettina Renz' recent IISS report, which is that "Russia is much closer to having the military it needs than has often been suggested." I'll spend some time on that issue this weekend, because I know too much about this topic not to write anything.

I have also continued to think about how the U.S. armed forces can retain the best mix of capabilities and force structure in light of the drawdown and the fact that DoD's current budget plan will exceed Budget Control Act spending caps by $88 billion unless major changes are made. One interesting idea being heard from people like LTG David Barno (ret.): Why not use the Reserves and National Guard to fill capability gaps? In particular, why not divert those officers and NCOs who are facing separation by next year to join reserve components? Don't we want to keep their skill sets and combat experience at a reduced cost, without slashing them from the force completely? My thoughts:

• Reservists are, undeniably, a lot cheaper than active-duty personnel: They cost $125K per capita vs. $385K per capita (respectively) and account for 16% of personnel costs even though they represent 39% of the total force. I think for many people thinking about this issue, that's reason enough: We have to take the force mix that is most affordable, simply because that's the decisive factor right now.
• Readiness is often the first casualty of more reservist-oriented force structure (just ask the Russians), since nobody serving in a reserve capacity can ever be as well-trained and competent at their job as someone in the active-duty force. But considering how expensive active-duty personnel have become in the past decade, and how much less money is available to spend on them, the readiness argument is probably moot: As (now former) Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness Clifford Stanley testified back in 2010, more money spent on "taking care of people" means less money for training and repairing/replacing equipment. (I've written previously about how personnel costs undermine readiness and why the Brigade Combat Team-centric force structure might not make so much sense for a peacetime force).
• Barno's proposal calls for a mixing of active and reserve forces ("blended" units) at the brigade level, even as he acknowledges that it's not obvious that that their capabilities are interchangeable. If that's going to happen, the active and reserve components need to be on better terms with each other than they are now: This means, no more fighting over who gets the Apaches and no more denigrating each other's value to the war efforts. (And the CSA needs to be able to set aside his own biases towards the active force.)
• Overlooked by proponents of the Reserve-based force structure (including the RFPB): Reservists tend to have higher suicide rates than active-duty personnel. PTSD also affects reservists at such a disproportionate rate that RAND did a study on them. This evidence suggests that not being full-time soldiers/airmen/sailors/Marines means that they are less psychologically adapted to handle the pressures of combat deployments.
• During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many veterans found that the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) didn't really help them in the civilian world: Employers have remained hesitant to hire reservists, and high unemployment of reservists (20%) persists, even though the Congressional Budget Office found in 2005 that employers were not substantially affected by reservists' deployments. Creating a larger force of underemployed reservists should not be acceptable in our sequestration-era defense planning, so USERRA will need to be updated (see this proposal, for example).

In the long run, I think the question is not if but when we face facts and start leaning more on the reserve components. But if we are going to improve the standing of reservists in the future force structure, we will first need more (or at least the same number) of reservists. The recently-released report of the National Defense Panel laments that the reserves will fall from 563,000 in 2012 to 500,000 by 2019: "The reduction in the reserve component is especially troubling in light of the increasing role we believe it will assume in future homeland defense and domestic disaster response." Kicking experienced veterans out of the active-duty force and reducing the reserve components simultaneously, intuitively, sounds like a very bad idea. But as illustrated above, keeping/increasing reservists poses challenges of its own, so more reforms will be needed before LTG Barno's idea will become a viable plan for the force.

As if the U.S. didn't have enough to be concerned about in Crimea...

...this story provides yet another case study for the cyberwar (or "cybered warfare", if you prefer) debates. Note also the observation that, "America’s military and intelligence communities are grappling with these issues at all levels, but it’s particularly important for the Army given the large size and expansive reach of Army networks, which are the largest among all the service and which extend down to the tactical edge. The Army is responding to these developments in numerous ways.
The Army is considering the formation of a new branch or corps of cyberspace operators that spans electronic warfare, cyber and signals, a recommendation made by RAND and others. Several years ago, the Navy moved to create an information dominance corps, which merges electronic warfare and information technology functions into new career fields. The Army should follow suit."

On that note, the report from RAND quoted in the article is also a good read.

This is neat!

I discovered yet another new blog on the Russian military and foreign policy. Today, Wikistrat published an analysis titled, "What Would a Russian Invasion of Ukraine Look Like?" I was not familiar with Mark Galeotti until now, but he's apparently done good work on the topic (including an earlier piece for Foreign Policy), so I am going to have to read further.

RIP James Schlesinger + more on Ukraine situation

I wanted to open this post by paying my respects to James Schlesinger, who died today at the age of 85. I'll admit I knew little about him until now, besides the fact that he pissed off almost everyone at the CIA by cutting their manpower 10%, but he was also a major proponent of two of the best modern combat aircraft ever flown by the U.S.A.F.: The A-10 Warthog and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. (He was apparently ill for a while before his death, but I wonder what he thought about the Pentagon's recent steps towards retiring the A-10.)

Now it's time for me to eat some crow of my own: I've previously expressed skepticism that a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine would happen. And it looks like I was wrong (apologies to my roommate). The Russians are claiming that the 30,000 troops now on the border are just an exercise, and the Pentagon has called bullshit on them. The UN has officially declared the referendum leading to Crimea's annexation as illegal, which is always re-assuring just because - well, it's the UN, and non-binding resolutions are always welcome at times like these. Meanwhile, Obama called out Putin yesterday, and then, surprisingly, shot back at Russian accusations of U.S. hypocrisy by defending the Iraq War: "[E]ven in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory, nor did we grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people, and a fully sovereign Iraqi state could make decisions about its own future." And now Russia Today has yet another rebuttal, calling Obama out for claiming that Kosovo's sovereignty, determined by referendum, was any more legitimate than Crimea's referendum. So that's that: Obama is flailing his arms angrily, Putin is sneering, China is sitting on the sidelines and watching, and meanwhile, Russia's troops are getting ready to take more territory away from Ukraine.

More worrying is that the discussion is now shifting towards other parts of the former Soviet Union that Putin might seek to bring back under Russian control. Gen. Breedlove, NATO's commander, has already pointed out that Transnistria in Moldova is a likely candidate for annexation. (The BBC has also put out a useful map of countries with Russian minorities to get one's imagination worked up over the possibilities, and it looks like the Washington Post is already following suit.)

Oh, and I love my boss' take on Obama's reaction: "U.S. says Russia is invading countries out of weakness. Europeans quietly hope it does not get any weaker."

So Crimea is once again Russian territory. Now what?

I'm still reeling in shock from a recent event that has truly rocked the world. It was something nobody could have seen coming, and it was the sort of thing most experts would have deemed impossible. I am talking, of course, about the stunning NCAA basketball upset that just took place on Friday, when Mercers' Bears managed to kick my Duke Blue Devils out of the tournament after beating them 78-71. Bear in mind that we were seeded 3rd, and the Bears were seeded 14th! This is the worst defeat we've suffered since Lehigh beat us in 2012, and as a Dukie, it's a loss that will take me some time to get over.

Oh, yeah, and the loss of Crimea to Russia is pretty bad, too (more for the United States, not so much for Duke). So, moving on...

The crisis in Crimea is finally settling, aside from continued rumors - mostly being promoted by the new Ukrainian government - of the Russians gearing up to move into southeastern Ukraine. At this point, nobody has any doubts that Crimea will return permanently to Russian control, exactly 60 years after Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as a "gift". (Actually, Khrushchev mostly gave away Crimea for reasons of political expediency - such as winning the support of Kiev's elites to assist in his power struggle against then-Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov - but I am digressing.) Ukraine is pretty unhappy about the whole deal - the interim President, Oleksandr Turchynov, is ranting about how Ukraine "will never accept the annexing of our territory" in the vain hope that his nationalist cred won't be undermined too much by the Svoboda Party. In Russia, Putin and his buddies are laughing at the sanctions that Obama's administration announced last week. (I cast my vote for Deputy PM Rogozin's reaction as the most caustic so far.) And in the United States, pretty much everybody has given their take on what just happened, what it means for us, and who foresaw these events (and who dropped the ball in predicting them). I've decided to collect a sample of those reactions here, for future reference and my own reaction:

• The loudest crowing is coming from Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin and their supporters, who are all too happy to point out that they were right and Obama was wrong about Russia's significance as a rival. (Romney himself has also written an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on what he calls Obama's "failed leadership.") And they do have a point - Obama, a man known for arrogance, is going to have to eat crow, especially after the 2012 Presidential debates. But I'm also not sure if I agree with the conclusion that "Conservatives have a history of correctly predicting world events."
• I haven't been at all surprised to hear people reference the classic cautionary tale of consequences for unchecked aggression - Neville Chamberlain negotiating with Adolf Hitler to achieve "peace in our time", back in 1938. The only surprise here is that none other than Hilary Clinton is among the voices making this comparison, not just the usual people we expect to hear at times like this.
• Last week, The Atlantic had a really good article examining why a robust American response (and certainly an American military response) is fiscally and politically unfeasible. Choice quote: "in today’s dollars, according to one estimate, the Marshall Plan would total roughly $740 billion. That kind of money would certainly enable far-reaching economic reforms in Ukraine, and likely anchor the country in the West for years to come. But, of course, the suggestion is absurd. Today’s Senate can barely pass an aid package 740 times as small."
• On the conservative side, Henry Kissinger is still trying to play the voice of restraint. Although Kissinger lost a lot of credibility in realist conservative circles by supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, he's being a lot more sensible these days, observing in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the time has come to "avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington" and that "[a] wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction." 
• Earlier this month, David Brooks got quite a bit of attention for describing the administration's policy as "The Leaderless Doctrine" in a piece for The New York Times. He laments that, "Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs. They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world. American opinion is marked by an amazing sense of limitation — that there are severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do" A more optimistic rebuttal comes from Peter Munson at War on the Rocks, who concurs with Kissinger that a more hands-off approach is just right for Ukraine: "Putin’s desperate, losing move will ultimately be overcome by the tides of history. Far more important is helping Ukrainian leaders—and other leaders in similar situations—to thread the needle, channeling the blind passion of the people to a reasonable end."
• There are a number of voices in defense quarters asking whether it was really such a wise idea for the U.S. military to spend a decade becoming a COIN-centric force now that Russia has returned to the forefront of America's geopolitical rivalries. Former Air Force General David Deptula is happy to point out that maybe SecDef Bob Gates committed a gaffe by halting F-22 production and then firing everyone in the military's top ranks who disagreed with his vision for the force. (And on another note, maybe this means no more sequestration, or at least less sequestration...or so they hope.)

Photos from Ukraine

Some of these pictures, as posted on Business Insider, are pretty eye-opening:

Uniformed men (rear), believed to be Russian servicemen, watch Ukrainian servicemen walk past a Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye, outside Simferopol, March 6, 2014.

Uniformed men, believed to be Russian servicemen, walk in formation near a Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye outside Simferopol, March 6, 2014.

A Ukrainian serviceman (rear L) gives a cigarette to a uniformed man (R), believed to be a Russian serviceman, at a Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye, outside Simferopol, March 6, 2014.

Members of a pro-Russian self defence unit stand in formation as they take an oath to the Crimea government in Simferopol March 8, 2014.

Ukrainian soldiers, left watch as a Russian soldier guards the gate of an infantry base in Perevalne, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 4, 2014.

A Russian soldier lies with his back to Ukrainian fighter jets as he watches Ukrainian serviceman at the Belbek airport in the Crimea region March 4, 2014.

Yet more oversights by Putin...

...this time expressed in a surprisingly thought-provoking piece by Slate. Some inconvenient facts Putin (presumably) considered:

• "That narrow strip of land tethering northern Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland, called the Perokop Isthmus, is the peninsula’s lifeline. What’s left out of most Western analyses of Putin’s brazen military intervention is the Crimea’s complete economic dependence on the mainland, which provides nearly all of its electricity and water and about 70 percent of its food."
• "Most of the Crimea is basically a desert, with less annual rainfall than Los Angeles. It is impossible to sustain its 2 million people—including agriculture and the substantial tourist industry—without Ukrainian water. Current supplies aren’t even enough."
• "After independence, Ukraine welcomed back the Crimean Tatars. Some 300,000 have returned from exile and their numbers are growing, with continued migration and birth rates higher than either Russians or Ukrainians. They strongly oppose any separatism, and they will not go peacefully into a Russian-controlled, authoritarian 'Yanukistan' along the lines of Transdnistria. Not only are they extremely well organized, they are Muslims with friends. Representatives from Russia’s Tatarstan region are already supporting them. Turkey, which controlled the Crimea for much longer than Russia ever did and has close ties with the Crimean Tatars, is watching. So are Chechen rebels."

The Waterloo analogy sucks, though: Please let's stop comparing these types of crises to major, Earth-shattering global events.