A Look Inside the Pentagon and Afghanistan

Here's a very interesting story from this morning's Washington Post detailing the circumstances surrounding the firing of General David McKiernan as the Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and his replacement by General Stanley McChrystal.

A couple of things come to mind. First, ADM Mike Mullen's "I'm losing kids over there...." statement--while assuredly honest and heartfelt, hit me wrong. It was almost as if he were trying to imply that he felt more badly about dying soldiers than did General McKiernan...which I would find difficult to believe.

Secondly--I begin to see why a Navy Admiral was promoted to Commander of the US European Command/Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Europe. Not just any Admiral, but the most talented Admiral in the Navy, Jim Stavridis. At the end of the day, CJCS Mullen and Secretary Gates had come to a point where their patience with NATO had begun to wear thin (and obviously their patience with McKiernan's continued courting of the NATO alliance structure as applied to Afghanistan). Mullen simply needed someone in Europe whom he could trust implicitly to craft the right mix of diplomacy and leverage where attempting to influence recalcitrant European allies.

Finally, I see here a macro-application of something I learned over twenty years ago as a young Anti-Submarine Warfare officer aboard USS MCCANDLESS (FF 1084) hunting Soviet submarines in the death throes of the Cold War, and it goes something like this. If what you're doing isn't working, do something else. If you think the sub is at 300 feet and your tail is at 300 feet--and you're not driving contact on a target you should have based on the P3's buoys, bring your tail up into the layer for a bit to see if the contact is using the water column to his advantage. Whatever McKiernan was doing in Afghanistan, Gates and Mullen saw it as wrong. Getting their own guys in place (Stavridis, Petreus, McChrystal) counts as "doing something"; the problem now is that if what they're doing doesn't work, you can't blame it on people anymore. Then, the blame is on the policy, the objectives, and the desired outcomes.