Remarks of Vice President Biden at National Defense University – As Prepared for Delivery, 18 February 2010.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-vice-president-biden-national-defense-university
Excerpt:
Now, as our technology improves, we are developing non-nuclear ways to accomplish that same objective. The Quadrennial Defense Review and Ballistic Missile Defense Review, which Secretary Gates released two weeks ago, present a plan to further strengthen our preeminent conventional forces to defend our nation and our allies.
Capabilities like an adaptive missile defense shield, conventional warheads with worldwide reach, and others that we are developing enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, as other nuclear powers join us in drawing down. With these modern capabilities, even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong.
Editor’s Comment:
Plans to “further strengthen … preeminent conventional forces” will further exacerbate strategic insecurity of other nations, making nuclear abolition impossible. If you think that U.S. military hegemony is a path to nuclear disarmament, think again. Other nations will never relinquish their nuclear arsenals to face “undeniable” conventional power from the U.S.
Gilles Dorronsoro. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2009.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/fixing_failed_strategy.pdf
Excerpt:
…the International Coalition, with its limited resources and diminishing popular support, should focus on its core interests: preventing the Taliban from retaking Afghan cities, avoiding the risk that al-Qaeda would try to reestablish sanctuaries there, pursue a more aggressive counterinsurgency strategy in the North, and reallocate its civilian aid resources to places where the insurgency is still weak.
Editor’s Comment
Some would say that Pashtunistan is already a nation which can’t yet fully establish itself as a state (although there is already considerable local governance, both Pashtun tribal and Taliban.) Presently Punjabi (Pakistani) and US/NATO military intervention prevent the establishment of a state.
Dorronsoro’s Afghan war strategy would seem to be a step in moving the Pashtunistan national cause to within a decade or so of success. Of course, the cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad would have to fall under Pashtunistan governance eventually, even if Western forces resisted for some years.
Gian P. Gentile. New York Times, 31 October 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/opinion/31iht-edgentile.html?_r=1
Excerpt:
History shows that occupation by foreign armies with the intent of changing occupied societies does not work and ends up costing considerable blood and treasure.
The notion that if only an army gets a few more troops, with different and better generals, then within a few years it can defeat a multi-faceted insurgency set in the middle of civil war, is not supported by an honest reading of history.
Algeria, Vietnam and Iraq show this to be the case.
Paul Rogers. Open Democracy, 29 October 2009. Hosted on the Commondreams website.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/03-6
Excerpt:
If there is a way ahead, it rests not on short-term calculations about troop numbers but on a larger reassessment by the Barack Obama administration of the entire US security posture in the middle east and southwest Asia. This will have to do more than crisis-manage the dire problems inherited from George W Bush; what is needed is no less than a move beyond military-led thinking to an integrated understanding of what security in the 21st century actually is.
Gian P. Gentile. Parameters, Autumn 2009.
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/09autumn/gentile.pdf
Excerpt:
Population-centric COIN may be a reasonable operational method to use in certain circumstances, but it is not a strategy.
Editor’s Comment:
Agreed! COIN is a collection of tactics. What is missing in Afghanistan is a strategy with any credible chance of success … despite the lip-service to political solutions.
General Stanley McChrystal, Commander ISAF, speech on Afghanistan to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 01 October 2009.
http://www.iiss.org/EasysiteWeb/getresource.axd?AssetID=31537&type=full&servicetype=Attachment
Frank G. Hoffman. Armed Forces Journal, October 2009.
http://www.afji.com/2009/10/4198658
Justin Kelly and Michael James Brennan. Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, 16 September 2009.
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/download.cfm?q=939
Excerpt:
Recent western military exploits in Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and East
Timor, all represent, if not strategic failure, at least failures of strategy. The question we need to ask
ourselves is whether this weakness is endemic or at least partially a result of our own theoretical failings by
allowing operational art to escape from any reasonable delimitation and, by so doing, subvert the role of
strategy and hide the need for a strategic art?
Editor’s Comment:
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, there emerged in this country a revisionist narrative of “meddling” by civilian leaders such as Johnson and McNamara which had “prevented” the military from winning the war. Although this narrative was almost entirely counter factual, it has had enough resonance in a nation deeply troubled by the war’s outcome that subsequent civilian leadership has opted to effectively “hand-off” wars to their generals and step back from responsibility for key strategic decisions.
Generals are, for the most part, skilled operational practitioners, but only sometimes do they have well-developed strategic skills or wisdom. As the authors point out, handing-off responsibility for strategic decisions to the generals is an error in the practice of grand strategy… and we should not be surprised with how often our subsequent wars have gone badly.
My hope is that President Obama will read this essay before making his decision about what to do next in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Chuck Hagel. The Washington Post, 03 September 2009. Posted on the Atlantic Council Website.
http://acus.org/new_atlanticist/limits-force
Barack Obama. Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention at the Phoenix Convention Center, 17 August 2009.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/20038/obamas_speech_on_afghanistan_and_pakistan_august_2009.html
an expert online panel, National Journal National Security Expert Blog, 10 August 2009.
Charles V. Peña. antiwar.com, 29 July 2009.
http://original.antiwar.com/pena/2009/07/28/nuclear-disarmament/
Excerpt:
…a country can be a party to the NPT but decide that abiding by the treaty is no longer in its best interests and withdraw, which is exactly what North Korea chose to do in January 2003, claiming, “A dangerous situation where our nation’s sovereignty and our state’s security are being seriously violated is prevailing on the Korean Peninsula due to the U.S. vicious hostile policy towards the DPRK.” Given that North Korea had been named a member of the axis of evil a year earlier and the United States was on the verge of invading Iraq (a non-nuclear power), it’s perfectly understandable that the regime in Pyongyang might believe it was in the DPRK’s “supreme interests” to no longer formally agree to be a nonnuclear power, i.e., a pushover for regime change.
The NPT is not a universal treaty. There are 193 countries in the world, but not all of them are signatories to the NPT. The result is the so-called “D3 problem,” or the de facto nuclear states: India, Pakistan, and Israel. These countries were never part of the NPT regime and were thus able to develop nuclear weapons, because they are under no obligation to abide by the NPT. And it’s not lost on the rest of the world – particularly the Muslim world – that the United States doesn’t hold Israel to the same standard as Iran. Indeed, like previous presidents, Obama refuses to even acknowledge that Israel is a nuclear power.
…the NPT does not exist in a vacuum. It’s impossible to ignore U.S. foreign policy, particularly a proclivity for military intervention supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. Since the end of the Cold War marked by the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States has engaged in nine major military operations, but only one of those – Operation Enduring Freedom – was unambiguously in response to a direct threat to the United States. This is a powerful incentive for countries such as Iran and North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons as the only reliable deterrent against U.S. invasion. As long as the United States continues to have an interventionist foreign policy (and the Obama administration has not overseen a sea change in U.S. foreign policy), it will be next to impossible to prevent proliferation.
Daryl G. Kimball. Remarks at the First Annual Strategic Deterrence Symposium, U.S. Strategic Command, 29 July 2010.
http://www.armscontrol.org/events/STRATCOMRemarks
Excerpt:
Without significant reductions in the role and number of U.S. (and Russian) nuclear weapons, and without U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, our ability to harness the international support necessary to prevent nuclear terrorism and prevent new nuclear weapon states will be greatly diminished.
Without these reductions and the test ban, many non-nuclear-weapon states will become less willing to agree to more effective IAEA safeguards, tighter constraints on the spread of sensitive nuclear fuel cycle technologies, tougher sanctions against violators, and improved interdiction efforts, among other steps.
In recent years, a growing number of national security experts and leaders, including President Barack Obama, have come to recognize the importance of dramatically changing the roles and missions of U.S. nuclear weapons in ways that:
* minimize the salience and number of nuclear weapons;
* advance concrete nuclear risk reduction steps consistent with the United States nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) disarmament obligations; and
* reinforce our commitment to eventually achieve a world without of nuclear weapons.
We can and should limit the role of our nuclear weapons to a core deterrence mission: maintaining a sufficient, survivable nuclear force for the sole purpose of deterring the use of nuclear weapons by another country against the United States or its allies. With secure forces, deterring a nuclear strike requires far fewer nuclear warheads and delivery systems than the current counterforce-oriented nuclear arsenal.
Thus, if the United States were to adopt a policy that explicitly limits the purpose of nuclear weapons to preventing their use by others, then it could drastically reduce its nuclear inventory to a total of no more than 1,000 weapons of all types—strategic, non-strategic, deployed, and nondeployed—within the next few years.
James Cahill. Small Wars Journal, 27 July 2009 (printable .pdf file).
Michael Cohen. World Politics Review, 22 July 2009
David Bromwich. TomDispatch.com, 21 July 2009.
Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009.
Comment:
Andrew Krepinevich (“The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009) writes that “the military foundations of the United States’ global dominance are eroding,” compromising the nation’s “unmatched ability to project power worldwide.” He would have us believe that unless reversed, this trend will produce dire consequences.
The problem with Krepinevich’s argument lies in its assumptions that “global dominance” is possible and that global power projection by the United States offers the most effective way of ensuring international peace and stability. Recent events call both assumptions into question.
Krepinevich claims that U.S. dominance, expressed through the projection of hard power, has produced a “long record of military successes.” Yet this contention is difficult to sustain given episodes such as those experienced by the U.S. military in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq (both in 1991 and since 2003) — not to mention the devastation of 9/11. It would be more accurate to say that force — even when wielded by the seemingly strong against the nominally weak — continues to be an exceedingly uncertain instrument. The United States’ penchant for projecting power has created as many problems as it has solved. Genuinely decisive outcomes remain rare, costs often far exceed expectations, and unintended and unwelcome consequences are legion.
A decade ago, some argued that the key to achieving permanent dominance could be found in “transformation,” a radical reconfiguration of the U.S. military meant to exploit the potential of advanced information technology. Krepinevich writes, disapprovingly, that this proposed new American way of war “faced stiff resistance” from dissidents within the military and that “the price for such willful ignorance can be steep.” Actually, it was the price of taking the bogus promises of transformation seriously that proved steep, as the debacle in Iraq amply demonstrated. These days, with transformation retaining about as much credibility as “unregulated markets,” the skeptics have come off looking a lot better than the proponents.
In fact, the pursuit of military dominance is an illusion, the principal effect of which is to distort strategic judgment by persuading policymakers that they have at hand the means to make short work of history’s complexities. Krepinevich argues that there is “a compelling need to develop new ways of creating military advantage.” As much as I respect his general acumen, however, on this point he is fundamentally wrong. The real need is to wean the United States from its infatuation with military power and come to a more modest appreciation of what force can and cannot do.
~ Andrew J. Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and History, Boston University
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65233/andrew-j-bacevich/the-limits-of-power-projection
Robert M. Gates, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009. Posted on the Commonwealth Institute Website (printable .pdf file).
Shawn Brimely. Parameters, Winter 2008-2009. Posted on the Commonwealth Institute Website (printable .pdf file).
Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press. presented at America and the World, a Tobin Project Conference at Airlie, 14-16 November 2008. Hosted on the Commonwealth Institute website.
http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/08Gholz&Press.pdf
Excerpt:
… an “over-the-horizon” approach would protect vital US oil interests without incurring the serious costs of the current strategy. It would counter the traditional military threats to Gulf oil interests as effectively as the current strategy, and it would do a better job mitigating the more serious future threats in the Gulf: terrorism against oil infrastructure and domestic instability within oil-producing countries. Furthermore, an over-the-horizon approach would bring US policy in line with American values.
Barry R. Posen. testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 15 July 2008.
http://web.mit.edu/ssp/people/posen/A_Grand_Strategy_of_Restraint_and_Renewal_testimony_for_congress_july_15.pdf
Excerpt:
The United States is a powerful country. Nevertheless, it is not as powerful as the foreign policy establishment believes. Political, military, and economic costs are mounting from U.S. actions abroad. At the same time, the U.S. has paid too little attention to problems at home. Over the last decade Americans became accustomed to a
standard of living that could only be financed on borrowed money. U.S. foreign policy elites have become accustomed to an activist grand strategy that they have increasingly funded on borrowed money as well. The days of easy money are over. During these years, the U.S. failed to make critical investments in infrastructure and human capital. The U.S. is destined for a period of belt tightening; it must raise taxes and cut spending. The quantities involved seem so massive that it is difficult to see how DOD can escape being at least one of the bill payers. We should seize this opportunity to re-conceptualize U.S. grand strategy from top to bottom.
Jeffrey G. Lewis. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2008.
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2008/minimum_deterrence_7552
Excerpt:
… some military officials have come close to suggesting that nuclear weapons meet no unique military need. In 2007, for example, Gen. James Cartwright, then-commander of U.S. Strategic Command, testified before the House Armed Services Committee that conventional capabilities have largely replaced nuclear capabilities, with the single exception of global reach against fleeting targets. If true, then the credibility of deterrence rests very heavily on the mere existence of nuclear weapons and their inherent potential for use, rather than on plans, postures, or declaratory policies.
Jeffrey W. Taliaferro. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San Francisco Hilton, San Francisco, CA, 26-29 March 2008.
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/5/0/8/0/pages250803/p250803-1.php
Richard Betts. Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007. Hosted on the RealClearPolitics Website.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/a_disciplined_defense.html
Charlie Edwards. Demos, November 2007. Posted on the Commonwealth Institute Website (printable .pdf file).
Barry Posen. The American Interest online, Nov-Dec 2007.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=331
Excerpt:
Iraq should therefore be seen not as a singular debacle, but as a harbinger of costs to come. There is enough capacity and motivation out in the world to increase significantly the costs of any U.S. effort to manage global politics directly. Public support for this policy may wane before profligacy so diminishes U.S. power that it becomes unsustainable.
Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz. International Security, Fall 2007. Posted on the Commonwealth Institute Website (printable .pdf file).
Andrew R. Hoehn, Adam Grissom, David Ochmanek, David A. Shlapak, and Alan J. Vick. RAND Monograph, May 2007.
Mel Goodman. Foreign Policy in Focus, February 2004. Posted on the Commonwealth Institute Website (printable .pdf file).
Stephen Biddle. Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, November 2002.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/afghan.pdf
Receive notice of new posts on this site through 
