I'll try to be polite about this. I'm having considerable difficulty believing that the U.S. government would use nuclear weapons to retaliate against anything short of an all out nuclear attack from Russia or China. Especially a terrorist attack. How much of the planet do you have to vaporize in order to destroy a de-centralized terrorist organization? So Syria drops some poison gas on Tel Aviv, are you going to level Damascus, a la Grozny, and leave a radioactive mess to dwarf Chernobyl? Why bother with smart bombs and avoid hitting civilian targets? Can you imagine how much support Al-Qaeda would have if they were the world's best bet to take down a deranged U.S. government?

The failed launch of two Japanese spy satellites this past weekend made me pull out my July 2003 issue of National Geographic. The article on the DMZ and a "tourist" trip to North Korea gives as much insight into what is going on in Pyongyang as anything else I've read. North Korea's military power is just a paper thin facade masking a society teetering on the edge of total collapse. If the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea weren't confident that a NK attack could be prevented with a pre-emptive strike, none of those countries would be taking the wait and see approach that they have.

Edited by author 12-01-2003 02:42 PM
Of the $87 billion allocated to Iraq, $66 billion is destined for military needs including $2 billion plus for naval operations and maintenance of which $80 million is slotted for the Dept. of Homeland Security Coast Guard Operations. $20 billion plus is allocated for Iraqi reconstruction of which $10 billion in contracts are let through Bechtel, Haliburton and KBR. Of the $20 billion half is to be repaid by Iraq.

And there seems to be little concern for Ba'athist infiltrators as some are alleging

...that U.S. officials have let firms associated with the former regime enrich themselves once more.

Two such companies are Boniye & Sons and Mediterranean Global Holdings. The first belongs to an old Iraqi family which had diverse business interests during Saddam's time. The family is widely reputed to have been close to Saddam and his son Uday.

The second is a London-based company headed by Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi- British businessman who left Iraq in the early 1980s and has since accumulated a fortune estimated at more than a billion dollars.

The CPA awarded Boniye "a couple of fairly large" construction contracts, says a senior U.S. official.

Most of the money has been raised by US treasury bonds paying 4% or less. 'Democracy' building is a very profitable business.

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21229

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/amend...emental_9_17_03.pdf

cynical joe - The idea that the US is 'just kidding' on its basic warfighting policy and has been for decades is strange for me.

The US has announced the policy. The policy has not been challenged by any major presidential candidate of any party, much less a subsequently elected president. What you're positing is a multi-decade bipartisan head fake on basic war fighting doctrine with regard to WMD. I don't buy it. Would the US respond to a mass casualty event that violated the chem weapons ban with a nuclear response? I think it would because it's always said it would ever since we got rid of our own chem arsenal.

RGlasel - You seem to be landing in the same boat with cynical joe. What evidence do you have that the formal policy of the US is such a long-running bluff?

Desmond Jones - You are in factual error on repayment. The Senate proposed a 50% loan formula which drew a veto threat (rare in this administration) and the loan clause was tossed out in conference. The entire amount is a grant.

I can't address the mare's nest of contracts because I simply don't have enough hours in the day to address more than principles. If you have a general contractor you trust, you trust that he'll police the subcontractors. If he does a bad job, the general contractor (who has an ongoing and highly lucrative relationship with you) gets punished all out of proportion to any kickback, bribe, or inducement that he might receive to let a bad guy in. Just look at Boeing to see the system working in action. They got caught and are now losing far more money than they had previously gained by their bad faith actions.

TML: Am I saying that US policy has been a bipartisan head fake: yes, thats what I'm saying. And not only to head fake enemies. The costs of developing, testing, storing America's nuclear arsenal is not an insubstantial total. This cost has to be justified. I think you can make a good faith argument that this arsenal has helped maintain peace, but I also think its a point one could argue.

Let's take your example of a chem attack on the US. First if its a non-state actor, where do you drop the bomb? Where the weapon was assembled? where the weapon was launched from? The home towns of the terrorists? What if the weapon was assembled in Paris and launched from Nova Scotia by a group of islamic militants from the Phillipines; do you nuke all of them, some of them? Secondly, if the chem attack did come from a rogue nation-state, why wouldn't the US simply attack that nation with conventional weaponry? Concerns about American casualties may have factored into the US's use of the bomb in Japan in '45, but modern air based weapons would do just as good a job as nuclear weapons without the global condemnation and without the glow-in-the-dark aftereffects. No country whose leaders have witnessed Afghanistan and Iraq is going to think it can survive a conventional US attack because the US won't launch the big one. It seems that there is a contemporary fetish to somehow conceive of a situation which allows America to unleash its nuclear arsenal in righteous indignation to save civilization.

Just as a matter of interest.

Since the US is not part of an agreement limiting nuclear weapons usage, the offical policy is that they are governed by the Laws or Warfare applying to weapons generally. This policy is explained to mean they will only be used to preserve the existence of the US or a major ally, prevent the destruction of the US Military in the field, or as retaliation for the use of nuclear weapons against the US or a major ally.

The policy of the US Government has been that a Nuclear attack on the US or Western Europe would be met by massive retaliation to Nuclear attack for fifty years or so. With restrictions on Chemical weapons the policy of retaliation in kind with chemical weapons is replaced with a nuclear response. The US Military, the operational part though maybe not the research staff of the Chemical Corp, has always considered Bio weapons to impractical (How do you control the spread of infectious diseases?) and there would be a Nuclear or Chemical response.

It should be noted that these policies are highly relevant to a NATO defense of Western Europe from a Soviet attack.


The big question mark has always been would a political decision be made to actually carry out this response? This is an even bigger question mark since the end of the cold war.


I think the any use of nuclear weapons would require.

A. The threat of a major military defeat if they are not used.

or

B. 1. First use of a large-scale attack on the US or a major ally.

2. A clearly identifiable target to attack.

3. The lack of clear attackable alternative target. (for example, topple a Taliban type regime that is not popular with the people it rules.)

Even if a nuclear option is not used, I think it is safe to say that any response to Nuclear attack on the US, a major ally, or our troops in the field will redefine the term “heavy handed.”

TM

About your hypothetical scenario. It is an interesting problem.


First if there is hot crisis, say the North Koreans cross the DMZ or some such thing, there are probably four to six National Guard divisions available, though because of the large selective call ups they may need to “mix and match” units and cannibalize a few others. Given the time to deploy they should get a reasonable if not ideal amount of train up time.

But your question is really about how do we get some extra divisions, if we want them on active duty before an emergency.

I think it really depends on how real Congress sees the need as well as how it is explained. Some thoughts.

A response to actual developments someplace will get a better reception than a general response to the situation.

If the request will also release reserve components from active duty it will get a more favorable response.

It may be more palatable if the new units are not organized into divisions or least formations that are called divisions. The term division carries a psychological weight that it might be desirable to avoid. A while back I proposed in Fliters a suggestion to increase the number of operational units without raising large formations. Basically activate two or three battalions a month to be assigned to existing higher headquarters. In the current Iraq situation there can probably be more units reporting to a headquarters than in a mobile war such as back in April.

This would be justification for the Republicans. I think if the situation were serious enough (the hot crisis) there would be adequate Democratic votes to carry the day.

Otherwise Bush would have to pull off what you described as his Lucy strategy.

Some Democrats have been accusing the administration of not having enough troops, though in some cases motivated more to cause embracement than a perceived need. If some how he could provoke a stronger public compliant about inadequate troop levels he could then respond to this complaint and the democrats could not successfully object.

Otherwise it is quite possible there won’t be a change until 2005.

The Samarra story is getting much weirder. Although the US military claims 54 killed, no bodies were found. No trace of dead or wounded, except civilians at the local hospital. Apparently the fedayeen were able to melt away in the darkness, dragging their dead comrades with them while under heavy US fire. What's wrong with this picture?

How can you determine how many enemy were killed if you didn't police up the bodies? This does sound strange.

TM: "What evidence do you have that the formal policy of the US is such a long-running bluff?"

No evidence, just an observation that in the past 58 years, the U.S. hasn't used nuclear weapons in a situation where conventional weapons could have accomplished the same objectives. Hank's scenario A, where nukes are only used when there is a high likelihood of defeat otherwise, is the only situation where the use of nukes could be justified to the American people and the rest of the world. Anything else would be seen as the actions of a deranged dictatorship. If an act of terrorism can provoke the U.S. into a nuclear retaliation, Osama will be applauding from somewhere.

Before anyone gets too excited about shipping troops to Korea, consider this: While North Korea has 1,082,000 soldiers (some of whom might be mannequins dressed up in uniforms, or wooden cutouts, but I digress) there are 727,000 troops in South Korea, only 37,000 of which are American. South Korea spends $12.8 billion US annually on defense, North Korea $5.1 billion. Both sides have more defensive capability than offensive, so the odds of either the South or the North being overrun are slim. If anything, the kind of air support the Americans can provide would give the South the advantage. What South Korea needs is a guarantee of air support from the U.S., intelligence from the Japanese and a promise from the Chinese to refrain from assisting the North.

re: SAM Impact Photos

Wow. How did the darn thing circle and land. If I'd known you could fly those things with only half a wing I'd have saved about a billion white knuckle landings!@

cynical joe - Every cost accounting of military strength I've ever seen has nuclear forces, pound for pound coming in at much less expensive than conventional. A nuclear power still needs an army as some military jobs are simply not doable with nukes. Nuclear weapons are always a cost and time savings for large jobs that could be done by both.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the head fake thing as there seems no way to falsify the statement. Give me a way and I'll continue that portion of the conversation.

Hank - The Democrats have a few set plays they like to run on Republicans. There's the 'RACIST Republican' one, the 'HEARTLESS Republican', and not least the 'WARMONGER Republican' one that is relevant here. GWB strikes fear into the hearts of Democrats everywhere by not letting them run their set plays. Would the Democrats be willing to suspend the first chance in years to run an effective set play in a case where they wouldn't be caught out by the general public for doing it? I have serious doubts.

RGlasel - See above for my comments to cynical joe. I can't argue against just an observation, no evidence unless there's some more meat to it. My feeling is that you're unwilling to confront the fact that the US government could do such a thing.

TML: I can't agree with your cost analysis of nuclear weapons. Weapons that have been used twice, TWICE in 60 years are not cost effective. Nuclear weapons have one use--strategic deterence, and now that the cold war is over, America doesn't really have a strategic enemy, perhaps China in the future, and so I'm open to the argument that it makes sense to maintain a nuclear deterrent in the case a strategic threat emerges. The use of tactical nuclear weapons I think though is a solution in search of a problem, conventional weapons and their current delivery systems are more than adequate for present and near future conflicts. The constraining variable for the US military is manpower and political will.

Edited by author 12-02-2003 07:31 PM
TM


Your strategy page link was a little disappointing, though in it’s own unintended way it points out a big problem whether the lessons learned are being reviewed by insiders or outsiders.



You work with computers, did you ever do any programming? From a systems design viepoint the amateur tends to write “spaghetti code.” Start with all the bottom level problems and build up the system up around them. When you trace the logic it looks like a bowl of spaghetti. For small programs this works very well, but for large programs it produces programs that often don’t work, are difficult or impossible to maintain, and are usually over budget. The better way to do it is to use a “structured top down” approach; engineers call this a “black box approach. Start at the top, define the problem inputs and outputs and the major steps in the process. You then have a structure at the top consisting of a “black box” for each step but you haven’t written the code for the step. Then you take each step ooor “black box” and do the same to it. You end up with a program does what it supposed to do, if there is a problem it is relatively easy to find it and fix and is much more predicable on the resources required to accomplish the task.



The article you linked is a prime example of spaghetti code thinking. Lots of good data (mostly correct) from the bottom level of the structure but he does not really look at the top of the system to see what the structure of the problem is.

For example he has an excellent description of the operational viewpoints of ground and air units with regard to air support. There are two things he does not consider that should come prior to his discussion.

First what is the overall mission of the Armed Forces? He realizes the Army and Air Force see their missions differently. Depending on how the mission is understood will change the relationship between the ground and air forces. If the mission is to “nuke them ‘till they glow” the emphases should be on the air force solutions, and if it is to throw out the bad guys and liberate their oppressed populations a ground force solution is more appropriate. Or should we maintain both capabilities? Put a little differently is the lesson learned to avoid ground operations in favor of strategic bombing or provide ground forces with the means to occupy and hold. Depending on how you see the goal both an air and ground lesson can be drawn from the article's evidence.

Second in the early 1940’s Congress decided and still thinks that the Army and Air Force should be split. Partly this was a result of their strategic vision the time, and partly the old policy of having agencies with overlapping functions so disputes must go back to congress for resolution. If Congress had decided instead to leave them in one service and force a more combined approach, there would be more of a common viewpoint. The Marine Corp witch combines tactical air and ground forces has much less of the problem he describes. Both approaches can work. There are problems and lessons learned with each approach, but if one do not see that the different viewpoints result are the indirect result of a Congressional decision, one is likely to make irrelevant or wrong recommendations.





The problem of using a wrong approach to look at lessons learned is common to military and civilians, insiders and outsiders. After all most of us live near the bottom of what ever system we are in, the “spaghetti code process" works for most of our day to day decisions and it is hard to transfer thought processes. This problem is solved by being sure persons making force structure decisions by personality or education tend to look at the problem top down.


The author correctly realizes that there is a consistent problem in applying lessons learned, and has lots of interesting data. However he does not correctly see where the problem lies. If one uses the wrong approach to analysis even “a totally dispassionate look at the lessons learned.” will not produce reliable results. However as he points out in the end, truth and logic will have their way. and if his approach is used the truth of this statement will be all to apparent.

cynical joe - I need the capability to destroy a city.

nuclear capability = 1 missile with one nuclear warhead
conventional capability = x troops, y ammunition

The combat nuclear capability and the combat conventional capability are equivalent by definition. I'm using x and y for the amounts for two reasons, first that I don't know the x and the y and second, if I did, I'd likely still get an argument which is irrelevant to the main point.

Your argument that construction + maintenance cost of the nuclear capability is greater than the construction and maintenance cost of the troops + ammunition. I think you're dead wrong.

To make an MX missile, for example, is a $250M expenditure with a much lower expenditure for maintenance, perhaps $10M. The army's budget is about $90B to maintain 10 divisions or about $9B per division including overhead (I believe nukes are in the air force budget so we're not double counting). For conventional forces to equal an MX missile, the destructive capacity equivalent of that missile would be <1% of one division including training, basing, arming, and overhead. I submit that these values for x and y are simply too small and they are too small by a large margin.

Hank - What I was trying to get at was the importance of renewing the military/civilian conversation. The aims of the armed forces are subordinated to civilian intentions by constitutional design. The growing disconnect between the military and the larger society is dangerous all around.

I'm not a programmer by trade, but come in from the administration perspective. We end up dealing with programmer's messes in the real world all the time. I do understand about design and black box development. I wouldn't call the underlying article spaghetti code but rather a nice prototyping effort for the lessons learned project. Prototypes don't have to be pretty and they're certainly not final but they focus attention on what are the essential elements to be solved.

TML:

I share Hank's evaluation of the Strategy Page piece. In particular, the CAS/DAS argument assumes a false dichotomy between those places where a ground controller is available to provide final control, and those where one is not. It also ignores the relative strategic mobility of lighter forces, and the greater likelihood those will be able to be employed-as well as their greater ability to provide the ground control discussed above.

The piece also has a flawed view of the lessons learned system. Its main design is to allow guys at the unit level to pass their experiences on to others who may conduct similar operations. It's not a tool for guiding acquisition policy. I'm all for conversations, but in order for it to be meaningful, both sides have to understand the basics. And the "civilian control" argument would be more convincing if most of the proposals weren't bids to avoid the reforms of the current civilian leadership (i.e., Sec Rumsfeld).

On the nuclear cost, the usual rule-of-thumb is that a nuclear force costs about 10% of a similar strength conventional force (though obviously it's less versatile, and not useful in most scenarios). However, the cost-effective argument probably shouldn't rest on how often a weapon system is used. If that were the case, Hitler's Wermacht or Napoleon's Grande Armee would be among the most cost-effective forces in history . . .

Cecil Turner - Hey, in baseball, .500 is a fantastic average. Thanks for filling some details in.