Thoughts on Benghazi

The Benghazi hearings are today, and I'll be paying attention. I'm not sure yet if today will turn out to be anything other than a political circus. Time will tell.

Today we are going to learn who is serious and who is a clown. There will be opportunities for both Democrats and Republicans to pick a side. A Democrat today will prove themself a clown if they become overly defensive to the point they push the idea that the Federal government cannot be held accountable for anything. It will be a defensive political reaction on behalf of leaders who are responsible, but may not be holding their agencies accountable. Republicans will identify themselves as clowns if they are simply seeking political blame, because there is nothing productive to find if that is the objective.

Leaders will be the elected politicians who try to figure out what went wrong, and what needs to be fixed.

I have a few theories, but the one specific thing I will be looking for is not new, rather it is a problem that has always existed but has, in my opinion, become worse under Obama. Dan Drezner highlighted this very well just before the election last November.

the most troubling element of Barack Obama's first-term foreign policy legacy -- his management of the foreign policy process.  As my Foreign Policy colleague Rosa Brooks has written about in agonizing detail, the dysfunction that was talked about in Obama's first year in office hasn't disappeared along with Osama bin Laden. 

Indeed, the aftermath of Benghazi puts this on full display.  To be blunt, for all the GOP efforts to make the lack of pre-attack planning an indictment of the White House, consulate security in Benghazi is not the kind of decision that rises to the White House level.  The aftermath of the attack is another story, however.  In the past 24 hours alone, report after report after report after report shows Obama's foreign policy agencies defending their own turf, leaking to reporters in ways that heighten bureaucratic dysfunction, and revealing the White House's national security team to be vindictive and petty.

That's the key in my opinion, inter-agency cooperation is at an all time low, and it is never really very high. It is not just CIA, State, and the DOD - indeed we have to add DoJ and DHS to the mix, because we saw manifestations where the lack of good inter-agency cooperation allowed one of the terrorists involved in the Boston marathon bombing to slip through the cracks.

And that is another reason why unserious politics will be very unwelcome today. Benghazi was the first attack, but with Boston we now have a trend of successful terrorist attacks. Are we learning the right lessons? Are decision makers asking the right questions? Assigning blame to Hillary Clinton or someone else isn't going to help resolve why we have similar breakdowns in both Benghazi and Boston, and if no one in Congress is seeking to address the roots of those issues today, the next successful terrorist attack that kills Americans leaves blood on the hands of Congressmen as far as I am concerned.

I don't want to hear about some State Department dweeb who thinks four SOF guys who were on the other side of Libya when all-hell broke loose, with no situational awareness at all in Benghazi, could have swooped in and saved the day with M-4s. That's not even credible and represents the tactical expertise of a paper pusher in State, even if cable news reports it as if it is some important revelation. The issue isn't what four SOF dudes were doing, it was why NOTHING, NO WHERE, was being staged for contingency. The DoD leaders watched and sat on their hands - HOUR after HOUR after HOUR, knowing Americans were probably being killed. Two of our top Army Generals, one of which is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's hard to believe, but that's what happened. Secretary Panetta was taking advice from the top General in the United States military, who was in the same room. It was supposed to be the best advice one could possibly get on a military action like that. Clearly it was not.

I very much would like to know why the COCOM requirement for a ARG in the Mediterranean Sea was being unmet during most of the Arab Spring, including late last year. There is a reason the Marines want 38 amphibious ships, and yet Congress is only willing to fund 33. Only a forward deployed and ready Amphibious Ship with a blue/green team could have produced the necessary intelligence and situational awareness, and fielded at the scene of action a combat ready force to rapidly respond to the attacks on our facilities in Benghazi. That is fact. That is a mission Marines are trained to do, and why we keep ships forward deployed. There was an unmet COCOM requirement for amphibious ships there. DC politicians have to date completely avoided that part of the issue.

So we have CIA security at a State Department facility without any DoD situational awareness whatsoever. Within two months we have the Department of Justice intentionally leaking evidence from an investigation that takes down General Petraeus, the top CIA man. We have Russia telling the CIA that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is a suspected extremist, information that comes not long after Tamerlan Tsarnaev is being examined by the FBI and DHS knows he leaves the country. FBI's investigation at Benghazi is so thorough the very first group of journalists to actually go to the battle location finds all kinds of sensitive information at the scene. Seriously? The agencies aren't talking, and are clearly not working very hard for each other. The agencies are all doing their own thing, and events continue to unfold where Americans are being killed in terrorist attacks - foreign and domestic. We elect leaders to insure taxpayer money is not being wasted. Right now  at least 5 federal agencies appear to be completely out of control.

Now lets ask the hardest question of all - is it time to start asking whether this the inter-agency cooperation issue has become much worse as a result of the Bradley Manning effect. We knew there was going to be fallout in information sharing between agencies because of what Bradley Manning did - a member of the Department of Defense stealing accessible data from the Department of State and exposing that sensitive data to the public. Anyone with any experience in the real world knew that was going to come back and hurt the data sharing process, and create friction in inter-agency information sharing capacity. B2B experts know how easy it is to share data - hell most Americans wouldn't believe the kind of data sharing about Americans that takes place in states that do background checks for firearms purchases, but the Bradley Manning effect has created all kinds of hurdles to sharing intelligence information in the federal agencies; an effect one might suggest is integrating into the culture of inter-agency business.

My starting assumption, based on information that I have read to date, is that both Benghazi and Boston represent acts of terrorism that manifested because of communication and cooperation breakdowns between federal agencies, and the reasons for those breakdowns are many - but were influenced in no small part due to the cultural changes in federal agencies insiders and keen observers noticed taking place after Bradley Manning released those diplomatic cables. American people are dieing. Two attacks is a trend. Who is part of the solution, and who is part of the problem?

Benghazi is a tough issue, maybe too difficult and complicated for serious people to score any political points. So today, if it becomes about scoring political points, expect another successful attack. If it becomes a serious issue where political points are scored on accident rather than intentionally, it means suddenly some elected officials decided to be leaders for a change, and do their job.

The result of all of this should, most likely, be a lot of work for the President. 

Three Bits

1. My book manuscript is finished (for better or worse), so I soon hope to be using the space that Galrahn has graciously granted for something more than self-promotion. In particular, I plan to return to the idea of writing a series on seapower in fiction. However, also expect some more book reviews, mostly associated with recent work on the airpower manuscript.

 2. Until then, self-promotion #1: I jabber about airpower and Syria with Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network, in Episode III of Foreign Entanglements: If you're interested, you can also "Like" Foreign Entanglements on Facebook.

 3. Self-promotion #2: In this week's WPR column, I think about how a 1947-style restructuring of the national security bureaucracy might go down:

Most of the time, when confronted with the clear shortcomings of the system in place, we choose to muddle through. Since 1947, the United States has undertaken a series of minor revisions to the national security bureaucracy. The most significant change came with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which affirmed the value of jointness and attempted to remedy the problems of inter-service conflict created by the National Security Act. After Sept. 11, the United States tweaked its intelligence bureaucracy by creating the position of Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, although these latter reforms represented more an effort to create cover for the intelligence failures associated with Sept. 11 than a genuine reform. On rare occasions, however, we have the opportunity to revisit national values and to redesign the institutions that constrain our policy choices. These contingent moments come when the accumulated weight of years of muddling, combined with geopolitical and technological changes, leave us with institutions fundamentally out of sync with the strategic environment the nation faces. There is reason to believe that the United States now faces such a moment. The strategic, political and technological challenges facing the Obama administration -- and potentially a successor Romney administration -- differ so dramatically from the environment that faced Harry Truman and Acheson at the time of the “creation” that they now risk pulling the national security bureaucracy out of shape.

On Reinventing Our Security Architecture

Apparently I spend a lot of time thinking about how we could recreate the institutional architecture of our military and security services as if there were no obstacles to doing so...

While counterterrorism was certainly understood as important during the 1980s, it did not dominate defense considerations. After the attacks of Sept. 11, SOF again assumed a prominent role in counterterrorist operations. However, counterterrorism itself now became the primary "problem" of U.S. security policy. So while special forces played key roles in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly the former, counterterrorism was redefined in more conventional terms. Fighting terrorists no longer involved small teams raiding terrorist hideouts, but rather large military operations geared toward regime change.

We can't know how the debate over the response to Sept. 11 would have played out had the U.S. armed forces been designed differently at the time. Nevertheless, the inclination to understand major security problems in traditional terms may be a consequence of the enduring structure of America's Cold War-era security institutions. In other words, as counterterrorism became the major mission of the U.S. national security apparatus, the traditional services came to interpret this mission in conventional terms. A different structure, one that privileged the skills and capabilities of SOF, might have come to different conclusions about the appropriate response to the attacks of Sept. 11.

My Visit to the Air Command and Staff College

Apparently, it's now cool to ask why the country needs an independent Air Force. Last week, I traveled to the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama to participate on a panel about the future of air power. I had been invited because of an article I wrote several years ago titled "Abolish the Air Force". Also on the panel were two gentlemen from RAND who had much more first hand experience with air power than myself. The audience consisted of the faculty and student body of the ACSC, roughly 400 or so mid-career officers. Most of the attendees were USAF, but there were also generous contingents from the Army, USN, USMC, and a variety of foreign military organizations.

I didn't use slides, and I didn't deliver precisely this lecture, but the linked presentation nevertheless represents a good summary of my remarks. After introductory remarks of 12-15 minutes each, the panel got down to the serious business of answering audience questions. In addition to the panel, I sat in on morning and afternoon classes focusing on roughly the same topic, where I answered more questions.

Below is a very rough summary of the questions I fielded and the answers I gave:

Are you serious?
As a heart attack. Some articles are written as part of a particular debate, and can only really be understood in the context of that debate; the claims made intelligible to the participants in a way that they're not available to outsiders. In this case, however, it means what it means; I think that the Air Force should be folded into the other two services. However, if I fail to snuff out the Air Force, I won't consider the article a failure; part of the point is to get people to think about the contingency and malleability of our institutions.

Relations between the traditional Army and the USAAF were pretty bad prior to and during World War II; wouldn't a return to that structure simply recreate those debates?
Possibly, but I think that many of the questions that animated those debates have become obsolete. The debate in the interwar period became very polarized, with air advocates arguing that the ground army was literally useless, and ground advocates allocating only a very small role to aerial forces. While I'm suspicious of "history teaches us" arguments, I nevertheless think that history has taught us that ground and air units must work together in order to have tactical, operational, and strategic effect. The current arrangement, in my view, makes that more rather than less difficult. Moreover, I think that aerial forces were improperly allocated between the services during the interwar period, and that this allocation caused some of the tension. In particular, strategic air components, especially today but even then, are more at home in the Navy than in the Army.

You argue that the career of military officer isn't as specialized now as it was in the past. This seems crazy to me. Explain why you say such crazy things.
I think it's clear that individual military careers are more specialized now than they have ever been; the technical requirements of flying an aircraft or operating sophisticated computer equipment or doing dozens of other tasks take years to learn. However, this specialization is largely independent of branch organization; a USAF lieutenant could be trained in most of the tasks of a USN ensign without really missing a beat. This is to say that while military professionals specialize in lots of things, they don't really specialize in being an "Air Force officer," or at least not in a way that is meaningfully distinct from being a "Naval officer."

Why pick on the Air Force? Why not just create a unified military, like Canada or China?
Because I think that there's some logic to the "mission" justification for independent services. I think that it's possible for both the Army and the Navy to think about conducting war independent of each other, or at least that it's much more possible for the Army and Navy to do so than for the Air Force. Apart from strategic bombing, every mission that the Air Force conducts by nature involves tight cooperation with one of the other two services. It seems to me that, if this is the case, the use of airpower ought to be conceived of as an organic element of how the Army and the Navy manage military force.

But what about strategic bombing?
Like Robert Pape, I'm very skeptical of the effectiveness of strategic bombing campaigns. I think that they violate an essential Clauswitzian prescription by failing to disarm the enemy, and that consequently they inevitably leave the decision whether to concede or endure in the hands of the enemy. Moreover, I think that the existence of an independent Air Force creates a situation in which civilians are faced with bad, destructive options about the use of military force. The Air Force, like every single other bureaucratic institution in existence, by nature tries to acquire more resources and improve its competitive stance. Consequently, the Air Force has a vested interest in presenting its best case for military intervention, just as do the Army and the Navy. In the case of the Air Force, this best case appears to the untrained civilian eye to be a cheap, easy, and effective way to wage war. This leads, in my view, to poor decisions about military engagement.

But what of the Air Force's elite service tradition?Service traditions should be taken seriously; military organizations reinforce and emphasize tradition for a reason. Tradition and esprit de corps allow a military organization to function. I'm just not convinced that the Air Force elite service tradition is that much more effective than, say, the elite service tradition of the Marines or of naval aviators. This is to say that branch independence doesn't seem to be strictly necessary to the maintenance of an elite service tradition.

This is only a partial recap of the questions I answered; all of the questions were good, some I answered more than once, and most I answered less cogently than I suggest here. I was impressed, but not surprised, by the professionalism of the student body and the incisiveness of their questions.

Finally, I recently received a grant to work on an expanded version of this argument. Hopefully it will lead to some form of publication, although I don't yet have a sense of where or in what form. This project has, however, helped push back my work on the history of anti-submarine warfare.