Houthi Drones Strike Saudi Oil Refineries

Yemen's Houthi regime has been engaged in a campaign of long-distance harassment against the Saudi oil industry for more than a year, as part of their ongoing war. This week they achieved their first significant success:

Drone attacks claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck two key oil installations inside Saudi Arabia on Saturday, damaging facilities that process the vast majority of the country’s crude output and raising the risk of a disruption in world oil supplies.

The targeted oil facilities can process 8.45 million barrels of crude oil a day between them, the bulk of production in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, said production of 5.7 million barrels a day — well over half of the nation’s overall daily output — was suspended.

Armed drones are so cheap now that any self-respecting terrorist force can use them, and Yemen has used them to launch a damaging strike across 500 miles. I mention this because it is a sign of changing military realities around the world, giving weak states another means of harassing stronger enemies and raising the cost of warfare. This reality is part of why the US military is so nervous about a war with Iran, since Iran can launch enough drones and missiles to shut down the Persian Gulf oil industry and make big trouble for US ships and bases.

Fear of this kind of warfare -- attacks by swarms of drones and cheap missiles -- is driving US military research and development, and is why we are spending billions developing laser weapons. Lasers are lousy weapons for killing people but they can disable drones and damage missiles, and they can fire very fast, perhaps (nobody really knows) protecting US assets from these new threats.

Meanwhile the immediate response of the Trump administration to this attack was to blame Iran, no surprise since they are always looking for things they can be mad at Iran about. And it is probably true that Iran supplied either the weapons themselves or the technical knowhow to make them. But the real cause is the disastrous Saudi war in Yemen, and the way to end this threat is for the Saudis and the Houthis to negotiate a peace.

The Spy Who Came Home

Fascinating article by Ben Taub at the New Yorker about Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case office in the Middle East who quit and became a beat cop in his home town of Savannah:

He joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, one of the darkest periods in its history, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq. But over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.” In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise—the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad—was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

Of his time in Afghanistan he says,

Tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

The assessments of field operatives carried little weight with officials in Washington. “They were telling us, ‘Too many people have died here for us just to leave,’ ” Skinner recalled. “ ‘But we don’t want to give the Taliban a timeline.’ So, forever? Is that what you’re going for? They fucking live there, dude.”

Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

The Navy Stands Down

After two fatal collisions between US Navy destroyers and giant cargo ships, the Navy has replaced the commander of the 7th Fleet and ordered a two-day "suspension of ship operations" to review operating and safety protocols.

The Navy brass is being very tight about this business, but if you know the Navy you know what they are arguing about behind the scenes. These days the Navy fights with airplanes, long-range missiles, and commandos. Its officers spend most of their time at Annapolis studying engineering, because of all the hi-tech systems they need to manage. Many regard the Navy as a giant career ladder that they spend their time in the service climbing, wondering when is the right time to cut out for a lucrative management career with some defense contractor.

A faction of Naval officers has long been very worried about all of this. They fear that the Navy is losing what ought to be its core competency: sailing ships. Good sailors do not accidentally blunder into giant cargo ships in the open sea, as in the first of the two recent incidents. And in a crowded place like the Malacca Straits, they exercise extreme caution to avoid collisions.

So I'm sure that in the Pentagon and at the Washington Navy Yard there is a lot of shouting about whether the Navy is judging officers by everything except how well they can handle ships, and whether that needs to change.

Rumblings of a Bigger War in Syria

What would we do if our Turkish "allies" launched a major military attack on our Syrian Kurdish "allies"?

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Days after a reshuffle of Turkey's top military commanders, President Tayyip Erdogan has revived warnings of military action against Kurdish fighters in Syria that could set back the U.S.-led battle against Islamic State.

Kurdish militia are spearheading an assault against the hardline militants in their Syrian stronghold Raqqa, from where Islamic State has planned attacks around the world for the past three years.

But U.S. backing for the Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria has infuriated Turkey, which views their growing battlefield strength as a security threat due to a decades-old insurgency by the Kurdish PKK within in its borders.

There have been regular exchanges of rocket and artillery fire in recent weeks between Turkish forces and YPG fighters who control part of Syria's northwestern border.

Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO after the United States, reinforced that section of the border at the weekend with artillery and tanks and Erdogan said Turkey was ready to take action.

"We will not leave the separatist organization in peace in both Iraq and Syria," Erdogan said in a speech on Saturday in the eastern town of Malatya, referring to the YPG in Syria and PKK bases in Iraq. "We know that if we do not drain the swamp, we cannot get rid of flies."

There are hundreds of Americans working in Syria with the YPG, including artillery batteries currently engaged against the Islamic State in Raqqa. Is Erdogan mad enough to attack the Kurds anyway?

Can you imagine Trump doing nothing if an American were killed?

This seems quite dangerous to me.

Trump Lets the Generals Have It

The latest leak from within the sieve of the Trump administration allowed NBC news to publish a remarkably detailed account of a top secret meeting of the National Security Council in mid July. It seems the point of the meeting was to get Trump to endorse the Pentagon's plan to send 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan and commit to years more of combat.

But Trump wasn't having it. He lambasted the generals for failing, saying "We're not winning, we're losing." He said that Gen. John Nicholson, currently in command in Afghanistan, should be fired.

Trump had recently spoken to some regular soldiers who told him the war was a disaster, and he compared Afghanistan to a troubled Manhattan restaurant where, he said, the waiters knew what was going on but the owners didn't have a clue.

I love this; one thing about Trump is that he is not afraid to say what he thinks to anybody. But can he actually have any impact on the situation? He may not like the Pentagon's plan, but does he have any clue what to do instead? Do any of his close advisers? In the end some decision has to be made, and if nobody can come up with an alternative to the Pentagon's strategy, that will be chosen by default.

Personally I would have pulled out of Afghanistan a decade ago, figuring that if the Afghans want a democracy they can damn well fight for it themselves. Keeping 10,000 Americans in country at great expense just seems to be prolonging the stalemate. I wonder what they really think in the Pentagon. Do they think that with some level of troops and planes they could finish off the Taliban and win the war? Do they wish they had 200,000 men but know they won't get them? Or would they rather walk away? It's puzzling, really. What do we think we are doing?

But I'm glad to see Trump calling bullshit on somebody.

Shall We Fight Them All?

Under this title, Pat Buchanan takes on the latest wave of American aggression. After noting that North Korea presumably wants missiles that can hit the US for the same reason other nuclear powers do – to deter attack – Buchanan takes a tour of other trouble spots:

Apparently, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. military has its work cut out for it. President Trump may need those transgender troops.

Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward.

Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea.

Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against?

I always think that when I end up agreeing with people like Pat Buchanan, strange things are happening  in the world.

H.R. McMaster

Of all things I expected from the Trump administration, naming the most interesting living American general as his National Security Adviser had to be at the bottom of the list. H.R. McMaster is both an important military historian and a successful field commander, plus he has repeatedly gotten in trouble for his forceful criticism of the Army brass and indeed the whole culture of the U.S. military. It's certainly a bold choice. If what Trump wanted was to grab some attention in a positive or at least potentially positive way, well, he certainly got mine.

Will McMaster be a good National Security Adviser? I have no idea. It may be that he lacks the political skills necessary to survive in such a job. It may be that circumstances in the White House right now are such that nobody could shine in that role. But I have confidence that McMaster will give serious, thoughtful, well-informed advice, and that he will not try to drag us into crazy wars, which is frankly the main thing I am looking for right now. Because Trump's own views seem to be all over the map on war and foreign intervention, I worry that he could be steered into a stupid war by bad advice. I don't think McMaster will give that kind of advice. So far as I can tell the difference between McMaster and his predecessor Flynn is night and day on every important question. What sort of president appoints both of them?

McMaster's reputation outside the military rests largely on Dereliction of Duty, a book that grew out of his dissertation and severely criticizes the military leadership for not resisting Lyndon Johnson's approach to the Vietnam War. If presented with the same sort of choice, will McMaster take a stand against a government he serves in? I wonder.

First, to study war as the best means of preventing it.

–H.R. McMaster, Veterans' Day speech at Georgetown University, 2014

The U.S. Army in the 21st Century

I was struck by these numbers:

In January, a US Army brigade of nearly 3,500 troops and 2,700 pieces of heavy equipment arrived in Poland in the largest deployments of US troops and armor to that country. . . .

Today's Advice

From General James Mattis, Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Defense, to his soldiers in Iraq:

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

Americans Not So Big on Foreign Wars

From a new poll commissioned by the Charles Koch Institute:

51.1 percent of the Americans surveyed in the Koch poll believe that the next commander-in-chief should use less U.S. military force abroad, compared to 24 percent who say that Washington should use force more often. 41 percent want European members of NATO to increase their own defense spending and start carrying their own weight. 49 percent agree with the notion that the 2003 invasion of Iraq made the United States less safe, and nearly 39 percent of Americans don’t think the 2011 in intervention in Libya made any difference to U.S. security at all.

Nor is this all. 51 percent don’t want any U.S. ground troops deployed in Syria compared to 23.5 percent who are supportive of the idea. Over 63 percent don’t believe it’s wise for the United States to provide Saudi Arabia with more military support in its military engagement in Yemen, and about 23 percent want the United States to simply withdraw from the conflict altogether.

And 80 percent think we should never send troops abroad without a vote from Congress.

Obviously this is not the most neutral source, but I have seen other polls with similar results. Of course, if you turn the question around and say "Should the US President do everything possible to fight terrorism, including military action" you might get a different result.

The Press and Foreign Wars

Damon Linker ponders why there is so little attention being paid to what he considers the five wars the US is fighting now: in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Somalia.

Republicans have an incentive to avoid a conversation about our multiple wars because the GOP finds it more politically advantageous to portray Barack Obama as a feckless commander in chief who has made the country less safe through grandiloquent displays of spinelessness. To put our wars on the table for discussion and debate would expose the actual truth, which is that Obama has very much governed as a hawk (albeit one who, unlike Republicans, prefers not to brag about it).

Democrats, on the other hand, have several reasons of their own to avoid a conversation about our multiple wars. First, because they quite understandably fear that the American people might object if they realized the Democratic administration was meddling militarily in so many places. Second, because the results of and strategic goals at stake in these interventions are so consistently muddled. Third, because it would reveal that Democrats are closely following the foreign policy vision of their nemesis George W. Bush.

Members of Congress, meanwhile, prefer to avoid making a fuss about our extensive military adventures — all of which are apparently covered by the comically broad Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists passed just after the 9/11 attacks — because their silence shields them from having to take partial responsibility for the consequences of the president's actions. Better to shirk Congress' constitutional obligations than risk having to take part of the blame if something goes wrong.

And finally and most troublingly, the press has an incentive to avoid a discussion of our actions in places like Somalia and Yemen because the details are extraordinarily complicated — and journalists have no faith in their own ability to explain the necessary historical and geopolitical background to each conflict in a way that will keep an audience engaged, or faith in the American people to process and evaluate that information in a responsible way.

It is a little disturbing how much in the way of war the president can wage without anyone in America much caring.

What are the President's Nuclear Powers?

Trying to scare people about Trump, Hillary and Obama have been harping on the chance that he might order a nuclear strike at somebody who pissed him off.

Which raises the question: can the president order a nuclear strike at, say, a nation that he thinks has sponsored a terrorist attack?

And the answer is that no outsider really knows:

Washington keeps details of the nuclear chain of command and its workings secret. The spokesman for the National Security Council, Ned Price, refused to say whether any other member of the chain of command could stop a presidential order to use nuclear weapons.

Although that hasn't kept various people from making the statement that this power resides entirely in the president:

“There’s no veto once the president has ordered a strike,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear specialist who held White House and Defense Department posts for 31 years before leaving government service in 2005. “The president and only the president has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.”

Wikipedia, on the other hand, has this:

While the President does have unilateral authority as commander-in-chief to order that nuclear weapons be used for any reason at any time, the actual procedures and technical systems in place for authorizing the execution of a launch order requires a secondary confirmation under a two-man rule, as the President's order is subject to secondary confirmation by the Secretary of Defense. If the Secretary of Defense does not concur, then the President may in his sole discretion fire the Secretary. The Secretary of Defense has legal authority to approve the order, but cannot veto it. The Deputy Secretary of Defense would then assume the office of Acting Secretary of Defense in accordance with the Secretarial order of succession. An Acting Secretary would, likely, face the same test: to countersign the Presidential order or be relieved from office. This potential cycling of Acting Secretaries of Defense could be reminiscent of the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” at the Department of Justice in 1973. (However, the Vice President and a majority of the heads of the Executive Departments could invoke section 4 of the Twenty-fifth amendment to the Constitution and have the President declared incapacitated. The Vice President would then become Acting President until the President submits a declaration to the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate that affirms his ability to discharge his duties.)

Interesting. Both of these descriptions may be correct, but they give very different pictures of how a nuclear attack would play out. I suppose the point of keeping the details of these arrangements secret was to keep the Soviets guessing, and prevent them from mucking up our nuclear response by kidnapping or assassinating the guy who keeps the other half of the code.

Back to the Times article:

In 1974, in the last days of the Watergate scandal, Mr. Nixon was drinking heavily and his aides saw what they feared was a growing emotional instability. His new secretary of defense, James R. Schlesinger, himself a hawkish Cold Warrior, instructed the military to divert any emergency orders — especially one involving nuclear weapons — to him or the secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger. It was a completely extralegal order, perhaps mutinous. But no one questioned it.

“Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command,” Eric Schlosser writes in “Command and Control,” a 2013 book, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Two questions: as the Cold War fades into history, do we really need the state of hair-trigger alert we were on for so long? If the president still can launch a nuclear attack by himself, should we maybe think about changing that? Could Congress perhaps leave the president with the power to respond to a nuclear attack on America, but require that any first use of nuclear weapons get Congressional authorization?

And how can we, as a democracy, have a discussion about this if many relevant details are secret?

Lessons from Recent Air Campaigns

British military writer Ben Nimmo offers five lessons from recent air campaigns in Libya, Syria and Yemen:

1. The likelihood of "target creep" in which air strikes expand to an ever-growing list of target types;
2. The likelihood of "force evolution," in which new types of assets are brought into theater to accelerate an apparently slow-moving campaign;
3. The inevitability of civilian casualties; 
4. The new information environment created by observers on the ground equipped with smart phones, camera, and satellite imagery; and
5. The need for a coherent post-conflict reconstruction plan focused on providing immediate civilian services – "shoes on the ground" to accompany boots on the ground.

Most of this is old hat to anyone who reads the news. To me the most eye-opening section was on the challenges created by ubiquitous smart phones.

The presence of camera-enabled smart phones means any action – from an airstrike to a simple equipment move – not only can, but almost certainly will, be filmed and posted online in near real time, probably with its exact GPS coordinates. . . .

Soldiers who have their own smart phones can compromise operational security and become a potential diplomatic liability by posting indiscreet pictures of themselves online. Indeed, one of the first indications Russia was planning action in Syria was a set of social media posts from members of the 810th Marine Division showing them traveling and posing in Syria in early September 2015. The risk to security becomes particularly acute when the phone camera in question is GPS-enabled. The coordinates are then embedded in the photo file, allowing viewers to identify where the photo was taken almost to the square yard.

Even if troops on the ground can be persuaded not to post selfies – in itself a challenge – anyone else with a camera and internet access can quickly betray their presence. For example, the arrival in Libya of a team of twenty US commandos, as part of the campaign against ISIL, was immediately revealed when the Libyan Air Force posted pictures of them on its Facebook page.

Likewise things like the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, or Russian bombing of US-allied rebels, also become immediately known to the world. I suppose spies these days spend more of their time searching Instagram than bribing agents or burglarizing secure buildings.

I am not sure that this has yet made much difference in terms of whether people are bombed or not, but it certainly bears thinking that operational military security will be very hard to achieve in the future.

What if PTSD is Blast Damage to the Brain?

Interesting article in the Times about Daniel Perl, a Neuro-Pathologist who thinks much Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is caused by physical damage to the brain, possibly from explosive shock waves. It's intriguing, and it would explain one of the most puzzling things about PTSD: why does it seem to be so much more common in soldiers of the modern era than it ever was before?

On the other hand, I would point out that PTSD affects many soldiers who have not been exposed to big explosions, and in fact many who have never been in combat at all. So it is unlikely to be the whole story. But I would not be at all surprised if it turns out to be a big part of the story.

More News from Mosul

The British military has announced that over the past three weeks their special forces have kidnapped three "mid level" Islamic State commanders in helicopter-born raids around Mosul:

A senior source said to the Mirror: "There are a wide range of activities taking place around Mosul which allow our commanders to shape the dispositions of enemy forces prior to any engagement. Seizing enemy commanders has always been a key driver in changing the way your opponent thinks, it will unsettle them and may force them to make mistakes.

"From our point of view killing the enemy is not always the answer. If we can get a commander to change sides, as we did in Afghanistan, this can have major influence on people inside Mosul and save lives."

As with other public statements about Mosul that we discussed here before, I think there is an agenda to this announcement. The general British policy is to never comment on the activities of the Special Air Service, as they call their elite commandos. So this is no routine news briefing. I suppose they are trying to send a message, or perhaps two: they want Islamic State commanders to sweat and constantly scan the skies, and they want people in Mosul to know that their oppressors are not invulnerable.

Could it be true that the unwieldy alliance getting ready to attack Mosul – the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, Shiite militias with Iranian advisers, the US Air Force, American, French, and British special forces – is carrying out a sophisticated plan to destabilize the Islamic State so the city will fall quickly? If so, that would be truly remarkable. I rather doubt it, though.

Is the Islamic State Collapsing?

Liz Sly in the Washington Post:

As European governments scramble to contain the expanding terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State, on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria the group is a rapidly diminishing force.

In the latest setbacks for the militants on Thursday, Syrian government troops entered the outskirts of the historic town of Palmyra after a weeks-old offensive aided by Russian airstrikes, and U.S. airstrikes helped Iraqi forces overrun a string of Islamic State villages in northern Iraq that had been threatening a U.S. base nearby.

These are just two of the many fronts in both countries where the militants are being squeezed, stretched and pushed back.­Nowhere are they on the attack. They have not embarked on a successful offensive in nearly nine months. Their leaders are dying in U.S. strikes at the rate of one every three days, inhibiting their ability to launch attacks, according to U.S. military officials.

Front-line commanders no longer speak of a scarily formidable foe but of Islamic State defenses that crumble within days and fighters who flee at the first sign they are under attack.

According to the Pentagon, the IS has lost about half the territory it controlled at its peak in 2014; some of the people Sly consulted think Mosul could be retaken at any time.

If these accounts of decline are true, they are great news, although the IS seems to be compensating for its losses in conventional warfare by ramping up terrorism in Europe and across the Middle East. My hesitation is that all of the people putting out these optimistic assessments have strong interests in their being true – the Pentagon, the Iraqi Army, the Kurds – and they have all underestimated the IS before. We'll know soon enough.

Retaking Mosul?

Not sure what to make of this:

The U.S.-led coalition’s effort to recapture the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has begun, according to the top U.S. envoy in the fight against the extremists.

“It’s already started,” Brett McGurk said on Wednesday at a speech at the American University of Iraq in the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimani. “It’s a slow, steady squeeze.”

The coalition is conducting almost daily air strikes against ISIS personnel and infrastructure in the city. Iraqi forces are stationed just kilometers from the militants’ stronghold and the Kurdish Peshmerga have recaptured territory from the group north of the city.

McGurk’s statement suggests the coalition does not plan to bring about the collapse of ISIS in the city by a rapid and large mobilization of troops. The current plans seem to involve patiently encircling the group and cutting it off from the outside world before a major invasion. “The formula is working,” McGurk said. “It’s slow, but it’s working.”

Colonel Steve Warren, the U.S.-led coalition spokesman, also recently mentioned how the campaign to retake Mosul. “Preparations to take Mosul are happening now,” he tweeted on Tuesday, “including precision air strikes by coalition forces.”

Seems like an odd sort of offensive. How are they going to “squeeze” the Islamic State soldiers in the city without starving the inhabitants? or is this announcement just a political move, designed to reassure some people and threaten others?

When did the U.S. military start announcing its campaigns over Twitter?

And here's a weird detail:

Those strikes have started targeted ISIS’s financial infrastructure and cash reserves, and U.S. officials estimate they’ve destroyed “millions” of dollars.

So we're bombing the mattresses where they hide their cash?

Can We Bomb Our Way to Peace in Libya?

The news from Libya:

Two U.S. F-15 fighter jets carried out an airstrike in northwestern Libya early Friday that destroyed what the Pentagon described as a Islamic State training camp for several dozen foreign fighters and a senior terrorist operative, U.S. officials said.

“We obliterated the camp,” said a U.S. official who discussed the raid on condition of anonymity. “We're still assessing the casualties at this point, but we hit what we were aiming at.”

“We feel confident that this was a successful strike,” Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. “These particular fighters posed a threat to interests in the region, to Libya, and to the United States overall.” . . .

U.S. drones and spy satellites had spent weeks focusing on the walled compound outside the coastal town of Sabratha, about 50 miles west of Tripoli, another official said. The aerial images, coupled with other intelligence, heightened U.S. concern that the militants were preparing to launch a cross-border attack.

The Sabratha Municipal Council, the local government, said on its website that at least 41 people were killed in the bombing, many apparently as they slept. The compound was rented by non-Libyans, including Tunisians, and machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were found in the rubble, the website said.

So, a “success.” And if I were in Obama's position I might have authorized this attack as well; who could stand back while the Islamic State prepared a major attack into Tunisia or some other country?

But I have to ask: what is the strategy here? Where is the legitimate government of Libya that we are intervening to support, and what is our plan for helping them? Who will be helped if our attacks “degrade” the power of the Islamic State? I don't have any better ideas, but I really think that the odd bombing raid is unlikely to stabilize the situation.

Even the Strongest

The last Navy SEAL to die in Afghanistan was Cmdr. Job Price, who committed suicide four years ago. In the Times Nicholas Kulish and Christopher Drew have a thorough look at the circumstances. Their conclusion: "he was a casualty of war."

According to some who knew him, Cmdr. Price was deeply troubled by having lost four men during this deployment, at a time when U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was supposed to be winding down. As they say, nobody wants to be the last soldier to die in a war, or the last officer to lose a man.

I was especially struck by one detail:

In his trouser pocket was a report on the recent death of an Afghan girl in an explosion near an American base.

After enough fighting and enough loss and enough disaster, even the strongest men can be ground down into hopelessness. And the more our way of fighting comes to focus on a handful of elite men and women -- special forces, fighter-bomber and drone pilots -- the greater and more lonely the stress on those chosen few.

A Culture of Order in a Disordered World

This is from an old piece by William Lind laying out his model of the four generations of modern warfare:

The First Generation of Modern War runs roughly from 1648 to 1860. This was war of line and column tactics, where battles were formal and the battlefield was orderly. The relevance of the First Generation springs from the fact that the battlefield of order created a military culture of order. Most of the things that distinguish "military" from "civilian" - uniforms, saluting, careful gradations or rank – were products of the First Generation and are intended to reinforce the culture of order.

The problem is that, around the middle of the 19th century, the battlefield of order began to break down. Mass armies, soldiers who actually wanted to fight (an 18th century's soldier's main objective was to desert), rifled muskets, then breech loaders and machine guns, made the old line and column tactics first obsolete, then suicidal.

The problem ever since has been a growing contradiction between the military culture and the increasing disorderliness of the battlefield. The culture of order that was once consistent with the environment in which it operated has become more and more at odds with it.