Oh, no, Ukraine is getting invaded...

...quite soon:

And this is the reaction:

On another note, someone I know on Facebook posted this:

I'm going to continue to monitor the amusing reactions and misuse of historical analogies ("Is it the Cold War again? Is it 1914 again?"), but right now, I'm a lot more interested in Russia's snap military drill that began along the Russian-Ukrainian border a few days ago. Ukraine's acting President, Oleksander Turchinov, has already announced that this a military intervention by Russia would mean war. Sadly, some of my favorite bloggers on the Russian military (i.e. Dimitry Gorenburg) have not yet written more about the topic, but I expect that this crisis is going to give analysts a much better idea of the modernizing Russian military's ability to conduct joint operations within its re-drawn (as of 2010) military districts. Whatever happens, that will be the most important comparison to come out of this crisis and Georgia in 2008. Back then, the Russian military demonstrated that it couldn't even grasp tactical basics such as establishing air superiority and cover for its advancing ground forces as they attempted to squeeze through one point of entry - the Roki Tunnel (which would have made them extremely vulnerable, had the Georgians not been equally incompetent). This time, they're facing the far larger and better-equipped Ukrainian military, which has less recent combat experience than the Georgian forces, but plenty of other advantages (among other things, a growing lack of dependence upon incompetent and poorly-motivated conscripts, something the Russians cannot say about their own forces). In the end, Putin and everyone else knows that there is not much that the U.S. can do to keep him from exercising power in the Former Soviet Union. But his army needs to have a better showing than it did in 2008 if he wants any future threats to have credibility.

Oh, yeah, and:

Thoughts on the importance of the NCOs in the U.S. military

Earlier this month, I psyched myself up to take my ASVAB and PFT - the two tests that I must pass (or, rather, ace) if I ever wish to become an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves. I wasn't too concerned about the ASVAB, but I was terrified of not being able to score a perfect 100 on all three events that constitute the PFT (for my age group, that means I have to run two miles in under 13 minutes, do 77 pushups, and 82 situps). But when I finally got to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) at Fort Lee for testing, I was turned away because it turns out that another MEPS in Baltimore has my information on-file and it needed to be transferred. So...it looks like joining the Army Reserves is going to have to wait (again). Oh, well.

In the meantime, I've been preoccupied with other matters. In order to get myself thinking about how I will want to carry myself around non-commissioned officers (NCOs) should I ever join the Army, I decided that I needed to remind myself of why they will deserve my respect as a lowly O-1. When I did my interview for my (eventually rejected) Air Force application last February, one of the major questions that came up was how I felt about NCOs.

I remember that I stumbled through an answer along the lines of, "Well, I realize that that as an O-1, I'm going to be entering the Air Force with nothing but my degrees and my theoretical knowledge learned in Officer Training School. Whereas a typical E-7 is going to have over a decade of operational experience, likely in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other deployments. We have to be able to complement each other."

But my interviewer, an Air Force Reserve O-4 who I had requested for the interview, told me, "You're missing the bigger picture here: The fact that the U.S. military has a professional class of career non-commissioned officers is one of the key differences between the U.S. military and almost every other military in the world."

Point taken: I didn't grasp why NCOs matter so much in the U.S. military. So I promised myself that I will have a better answer when I interview before the Army officer recruiting board. To that end, I have sought out reading material on the topic, and it just so happens that in December 2013, the National Defense University published a brand-new tribute to NCOs and their naval equivalents, Petty Officers (POs). It's called The Non-commissioned Officer and Petty Officer: Backbone of the Armed Forces, and it can be downloaded here. Aside from the foreward, written by J-7 Chief Martin Dempsey, the book's content is the product of a team of Sergeant Majors, Master Sergeants, and Chief Petty Officers serving at NCO/PO academies across the United States.The first chapter of the book is written in somewhat flowery language, but otherwise does a good job articulating what it is that makes NCOs/POs so important:

• "NCOs/POs are the specially trusted leaders who provide an indispensable and irreplaceable linkage between command guidance and mission execution."
• "NCOs/POs nurture individual and organizational well-being by genuinely caring for their subordinates and promoting morale and esprit de corps within their units."
• "By teaching, coaching, and mentoring the force, and by instilling a sense of unity, purpose, good order, and discipline—and demanding compliance with standards, tradition, culture, customs, and courtesies—they are looked upon as the organization’s pillars of strength and loyalty."
• "Because they are the leaders closest to the force, NCOs/POs have the greatest effect on accomplishing organizational goals and achieving mission success."
• "NCOs/POs are a commander’s treasure, a source of seasoned perspectives that transcends place in the organizational hierarchy, a place neatly balanced between mission and people. They provide the commander and officer corps with unique insights and actionable perspectives while also providing an enlisted voice in matters concerning operations, administration, readiness, and the well-being of the force."

For my purposes, Chapter 4 was of greatest interest, because this is where the book addresses the ways that NCOs/POs complement commissioned officers. They discuss the three Cs' of good NCOs - they must be "competent, credible, and capable", and describe the NCO's role to the CO as "[the] principal advisor, a source of competence and counsel, who enhances the officer’s ability to command effectively."

There's another reason to consider the importance of NCOs in the U.S. military: Many analysts who talk about other modernizing armed forces in comparison to ours tend to overlook the role NCOs play. Discussions of the Russian armed forces of Chinese People's Liberation Army tend to speak mostly to their attempts at acquiring new weapons and technology, or re-organizing their force structure for greater agility and faster deployment timetables. Often overlooked is the fact that the Russians hope that they can recruit 64,000 NCOs, and the PLA wants to attract 150,000 well-trained college graduates for enlistment, under the assumption that will be better-suited to operating the complex new weapons systems it wishes to purpose. Both countries seem to recognize that having an NCO corps is essential to transforming their formerly conscript-based mass mobilization armies into professional all-volunteer forces, and I think that's worth keeping in mind. Officers and junior enlisted men will always be easy to recruit for short-term service stints, but the NCOs will always be the most valuable commodity to the force.

My unpublished article on HTS

Last month, I wrote an article that was intended for a certain online publication (which shall remain nameless). It was turned down, sadly, so I've decided to post it here. It's not well-written, but doing the research allowed me to familiarize myself with the controversy surrounding the Human Terrain System (on a related note, check out this book review by an NDU colleague).

Here it is:

A Congressman Is Waging War Against the Army’s Human Terrain Teams

Since its launch in 2006, the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) has been the subject of considerable online controversy.

The program was created to further the goals of the U.S. military’s then-new population-centric counterinsurgency campaign plan as outlined in FM3-24. HTS sought to embed military personnel and civilian social scientists within military units—usually at the Brigade level—in order to provide vital sociocultural understanding within the area of operations. Without adequate sociocultural understanding of Afghanistan and Iraq, unit commanders were less likely to wage an effective counterinsurgency campaign through the support of the local population. The teams of embedded advisors comprising the Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) would collect information on local cultures, tribal structures, and economics that could be used to brief Brigade commanders and their staffs, or uploaded into databases. (In Iraq, one HTT determined that restoring marshes in southern Iraq—previously decimated under Saddam Hussein’s regime—was vital to restoring the local economy and reducing arms smuggling to insurgents.)

But HTS has faced attacks from a variety of critics, some of whom have gone so far as to compare the program to the F-35 and label it one of the most “insanely wasteful projects the Pentagon is spending your money on.” The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has long opposed HTS on the grounds that it violates the AAA Code of Ethics because “information provided by HTS anthropologists could be used to make decisions about identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations”; the AAA recently re-affirmed this stance. U.S. Army Colonel Gian Gentile, a prominent critic of the military’s embrace of population-centric counterinsurgency, has claimed that the effectiveness of the HTTs was “dubious at best” (though his claims have their own critics). Blogger John Stanton has written about HTS since 2007 and leveled numerous criticisms against the program; for instance, that “Hamas’ IT Tops Human Terrain System IT in Internet Capability, Savvy”.

In recent months, during Congressional debates over allocations for the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, the program was again targeted by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who called upon Congress to shut down the entire program in a December 2013 letter to the House Armed Services Committee. Pointing out that the Army already halved funding in 2013, Rep. Hunter argues that “the overall cost and failures of HTS indicate that the program be considered for termination.”

In his letter, Rep. Hunter cited a litany of allegations that led the Army to conduct its own investigation of HTS in 2010: Sub-standard work, inflated time sheets, incompetent supervisors, racism, sexism, and—guaranteed to resonate in the current political climate—the employment of CGI Federal (of Healthcare.gov infamy) as the main federal contractor behind the program. (Hunter neglects to mention that most of the aforementioned problems originated when BAE Systems held the program contract.) Even more recently, Rep. Hunter has complained that the total cost of the program, $726 million since 2007, remains unjustifiable in the current fiscal climate. He also has also expressed skepticism that the problems with HTS have been adequately addressed.

At the moment, the Army continues to defend the program. In a letter to Rep. Hunter in March 2013, Secretary of the Army John M. McHugh called the expertise provided by the HTTs “critical to military planning and operations.” McHugh has re-itereated this stance  again in recent months, claiming that 95 percent of commanders and staff members in Afghanistan “assessed HTS information as actionable and useful for decision-making.” However, it is not yet clear that the controversy over HTS will ever go away completely, given the negative media coverage and Rep. Hunter’s campaign against the program.

However, an alternative perspective of HTS has emerged in the past year. At the National Defense University in Washington, DC, a team of researchers led by Dr. Christopher J. Lamb has conducted the most in-depth assessment to date about HTS in Afghanistan. Their conclusions were published in a book, Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare, and a July 2013 article for Joint Force Quarterly. Using data from over 100 interviews, the team’s findings and recommendations paint a more complete, though hardly uncritical, picture of what the HTS has accomplished and its future value to ground forces:

·         Human Terrain Teams had to overcome numerous organizational limitations to perform well, but were able to meet, and even exceed, the expectations of commanders who did not fully appreciate the optimal role the teams could play in an integrated counterinsurgency campaign.

·         In fact, the large majority of field commanders thought HTTs were effective. This finding also echoes previous studies by researchers at West Point, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.

·         Throughout its history, the U.S. military has regularly had to develop sociocultural expertise at great cost after the initiation of conflict, and often too late to ensure success.  Eliminating HTS now because it experienced growing pains would be repeating a mistake rather than learning from history.

·         The program will likely perform better under the management of the Army’s Special Operations Command rather than the Training and Doctrine Command, which is not properly suited to support HTS. Dr. Lamb also made this argument in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in July 2012.

At a time when the Pentagon is facing enormous pressure to cut wasteful spending, it is understandable that the axe has swung in the direction of controversial programs that have come under public scrutiny. However, research suggests that Congress’ decision on the future of HTS must consider a more nuanced perspective than that currently represented in the public debate.

First blog post in 2014: Fighter costs

I'm still not blogging as much as I was when I started out - and it's partially due to a family emergency over the holidays. So, quick update: I just read a new article in The Diplomat that caught my eye: "Why Do Fighter Aircraft Cost So Much?" Highlights:

• "in many cases, governments only pretend to care about the expense of their fighters. Money spent on cost overruns for F-35s doesn’t just disappear; it makes defense contractors wealthy and generates jobs across the country. Representatives from districts that produce expensive fighters have literally no incentive to hold costs in line. The same goes for more authoritarian systems in which different power brokers use military spending to favor specific communities and interest groups."
• "An under-mentioned point in defense procurement debates is that the purchase of advanced fighter aircraft is often less about national defense than national identity. Both civilian and military leaders tend to resent the idea that neighbors and rivals will own and operate more capable, advanced, and expensive aircraft. Moreover, states don’t simply buy advanced fighters 'off the shelf,' as advanced aircraft have historically required long term deals for training, maintenance, and spare parts. Buying a fighter means buying a political relationship."
• "the advent of 3D printing may well mean that customers will have the opportunity to carry out much needed maintenance and repairs without relying on the sellers as much as they have in the past.  The days in which the Soviet Union could use MiG-23 airframes as a loss leader for jet engines, or in which the United States could use long-term maintenance agreements as a club to encourage additional purchases, are coming to an end."

Also, I've been paying way less attention to cyberwar and cybersecurity lately, but Peter Singer was recently quoted in a new Popular Mechanics article on the topic where (among other points) he draws attention to the continued business cultural ignorance of cyberspace at the higher levels - a problem I would argue the business community still shares with the military community:

• "As far as the actual surveillance activities that Snowden disclosed, I personally don't think that senior political leaders would have authorized many of them if they had understood the full ramifications. The discussion would have been fundamentally different if people had been able to connect the dots...Seventy percent of business executives, whether they're in car companies or defense companies, have already made a cybersecurity decision for their firm in some way, shape, or form, despite the fact that no major MBA [Master of Business Administration] program teaches this as a regular course of business management."

Good thing I did not invest much in Bitcoin...

...and by that, I mean either my money or my self-esteem.

Today, BTC China, China's largest bitcoin exchange, was shut down by the Chinese government. And this is after the government already announced on December 5 that its financial institutions were no longer allowed to deal in Bitcoin, its first attempt to regulate the currency. As of today, the People's Bank of China has informed 10 of the PRC's largest third-party payment processing companies that they were required to cease all Bitcoin transactions, or else.

Not surprisingly, Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal is delighted that he now gets to gloat in front of all the people who sent him death threats and made fun of his sexuality. He's happy to point out that since BTC China announced it would no longer be accepting deposits, the value of a Bitcoin has more than halved, from $1000 to $500.

The first time I ever posted about Bitcoin, one of the questions I asked myself was whether Bitcoin would really prove to be immune to government control and currency manipulation. I subsequently wondered what it meant that the Chinese had embraced Bitcoin, since they're the most notorious currency-manipulators in the world. Well, here are some reasons another author has suggested that Bitcoin took off in China in the first place:

• They’ve already done the whole virtual currency thing—with Q Coin.
• As a medium of exchange, Bitcoin could help Chinese people evade currency controls.
• Insane speculation schemes aren’t so crazy to many Chinese people. 
• PCs abound.
• Chinese techies are used to spending an ungodly amount of time mining virtual coins in online games.
• The government can’t track it, can’t block it, and can’t crack down on it.

All of these are, of course, very good reasons why venture capitalists in China would be happy to throw a ton of money behind Bitcoin. Then there's the possibility that by investing in Bitcoin, China is boosting Bitcoin's potential to displace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency - a goal that the Chinese government shares with Bitcoin's founders and fanboys.

But remember that in China, the purpose of economic growth (along with almost any other government initiative, like defense modernization) is to maintain social stability and the legitimacy of the Communist Party, as we are constantly reminded by the party's own leadership. When a currency's biggest public selling point is that it's immune to government control, it should figure that the Chinese government is going to start getting nervous once reality sets in and they realize that yes, in fact, Bitcoin might in fact be something even they can't control. What's happening is that the need to make money is not always compatible with the need for control, as Quartz's Adam Pasick points out:

"Ultimately China had little choice but to crack down on bitcoin, because it made it all too easy for Chinese investors to evade already- porous currency controls and anonymously move their funds out of the country. More generally, Beijing had an aversion to a volatile, decentralized and possibly destabilizing digital currency that it could not control...By shunning bitcoin, China...may be passing up the chance to leapfrog the rest of the world by fostering the growth of bitcoin-esque digital currencies and the secure, efficient payments that they may enable. But when a country is simultaneously trying to grow, reform, and maintain tight control of its economy, something’s gotta give."

But...this is where things get a whole lot more interesting. As I was sitting down to write this blog post, I saw some new articles pop up in my Twitter feed. It seems that Bitcoin hackers have retaliated by launching DDOS attacks against the People's Bank of China web site. So just in case we (and the CCP) forgot, take note: Bitcoin isn't just an Internet currency; it's also an Internet movement with a cyber-army of hacktivists that don't take kindly to Chinese au-thor-i-tah. Now, let's see what the Bitcoin army is capable of doing; presumably, Joe Weisenthal is relieved that they've got someone to hate more than himself.

20 years of DOOM!

I'm still trying to overcome my continued posting drought and motivate myself to write again. My job/internship search is really difficult right now, so I spend more time checking Indeed.com and the Brad Traverse Group than writing (and that's when I'm not watching funny videos to ease the anxiety of being on the job market). But let me indulge in my nerd side and reminisce about Doom, which celebrated its 20th birthday this month - on December 10, to be exact. I might have forgotten about this momentous occasion had I not read an interesting little Ars Technia article in which the editors reflected on how Doom changed video gaming forever. Most people who were playing games on their personal computers in the 1990s became addicted to first-person shooters (FPS) after playing Doom, and that includes myself.

Actually, I didn't start getting into Doom until the release of the sequel in 1994, which I first played at a friend's house. Previously, I had once watched one of my Dad's graduate students playing Wolfenstein 3D, but had never been allowed to play, because this student wasn't sure I should be playing something so violent*. So one of my earliest and fondest gaming memories was when I took control of the keyboard and mouse in Doom II and scored my first chainsaw kill against a zombie. It only got more exciting once I got my hands on the game's shotgun and started capping Imps. At the time, I had seen nothing like it, and the semi-3D graphics engine seemed amazing to me back then (The Division be damned!) Unfortunately, back then, nobody I knew had even a 28.8 bps modem, so I never got to experience the online play, which is undoubtedly the single greatest contribution that Doom made to gaming (its significance was not that it was the first FPS, or even the Id Software team's first FPS.) I did try Doom online, about a decade later, but by that point, I had been playing Counter-Strike for so long that there was no way I'd ever enjoy it.

There's another, military/political science-y reason I'm reflecting on Doom: I wonder how many young men from my generation would have ever even considered serving their country had they not spent years playing FPS descendants of Doom? I know I can attribute my own interest in the military to the years I spent playing the aforementioned Counter-Strike, as well as DoD's own FPS recruitment tool, America's Army, during my teen years. There are already political scientists who have studied the effects of war toys and war movies on the militarization of the United States: See, for instance, the ironically-named Patrick Regan's groundbreaking 1994 study on this topic for the Journal of Peace Research. Personally, I'm still waiting for them to update Waltz' Man, the State, and War to think about where the popularity of FPS games falls into IR theory (I would imagine that it affects both the second-image and third-image factors in Waltz' theory). This article in the European Journal of American Studies is the closest thing I've seen to an attempt, but the journal seems a bit too Euro-lefty to be credible. I also found this article by two professors at Fordham University to be interesting, but not theoretical enough for my purposes. And that's all that Google Scholar has found for me; I guess I'll have to check out DTIC next to see what's been published.

Hopefully, Doom's next major anniversary (25th, 30th?) will provide occasion to re-visit this topic and see new scholarship on FPS games, cultural militarism, and IR theory, because I imagine there is a lot of good work to be done on this topic. When even the PLA starts getting into the gaming biz, I think it's time to regard FPS popularity as a cultural factor that can't be ignored.





*Interesting tidbit: The student in question, who was then getting his Ph.D in my Dad's research group at Duke, was none other than Carl Schnurr, who eventually became a gaming pioneer himself as the lead designer for Rainbow Six, the first "tactical shooter" FPS.

Getting back into action

I know, I know...I've been gone for way too long. I had intended to write a blog post for Veteran's Day, but I backed off, mostly because I wasn't satisfied with how it was turning out or what I had to say on the topic (here comes my perfectionist side again). Then I got really busy with my hopefully soon-to-be-published paper for work, and then I was off on Thanksgiving break. I told myself I'd catch up on reading and writing over the break, but I lied to myself. There was a lot I wanted to cover during my hiatus. But for now, I am going to briefly touch on the debate over force readiness.

Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno has been lamenting for quite some time that the Army is at "the lowest readiness levels I’ve seen within our Army since I’ve been serving for the last 37 years", as he did again earlier this month. This warning comes on top of the Army's move towards Progressive/Tiered Readiness earlier this year, which was itself controversial.

Some of my immediate thoughts on this topic:

1. Readiness is based upon fulfillment of troop strength, budgetary allocation, and training (among other things). As the article cited above mentions, Larry Korb over at the Center for American Progress has blamed the mechanism of sequestration for the Army's financial difficulties: "The Pentagon’s problems are not caused by the amount of money that is available under sequestration but by the process that requires them to cut all items in the budget, other than military personnel, by an equal amount."
2. Defense News had a really interesting article pointing out that this is not the first time we've heard the force readiness siren from top brass; indeed, I recall that in 2006, the Democrats even tried to use the detrimental effect on readiness to argue against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Gauging force readiness is not the same now that the Brigade Combat Team replaced the division as the primary deployable unit in the Army; this makes me wonder whether we should  re-visit the criticisms of Lt. Col. Stephen Melton from 2005 during the force transformation process. Among other things, Melton complained about the larger staffing/C2 requirements for BCTs; one can imagine how much readiness will suffer in an austere fiscal climate if there are more people to train/mentor, more technology to master, and fewer resources by which to do it all. And since, as Larry Korb points out, the budget cuts do not affect actual military personnel, it should follow that BCTs have created more soldiers who get more entitlements - which leaves less money for equipment and training and anything else that a BCT needs that might affect its readiness for combat.
4. Bottom line: Yes, the Army might very well have far lower readiness on paper, and it might even be the "lowest in 37 years". But from where I'm standing, the real issue here is that the Army is suffering from an unanticipated side effect of the modular force transformation, rather than budgetary constraints per se.