The Drone Controversy, Viewed From All Sides »

As the confirmation hearings by the Senate of John Brennan to be named CIA director drew near, the heat intensified over the program of death by drone enough to cause the Obama White House to finally relent, pledging to release to lawmakers the document that it had even gone to court to keep secret.

An opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, the document gives the President legal cover for killing, without due process of trial, an American citizen in September of 2011 in Yemen and of his 17-year-old son two weeks later. The practice of conjuring after-the-fact legal justifications for deeds already done brings to mind the opinions issued by that same office during the Bush administration that blessed “enhanced interrogation techniques”, otherwise known as torture.

Just days before the hearing, NBC News had obtained and released a copy of a white paper that supposedly summarized the contents of the longer opinion. That finally undercut the White House’s long campaign to keep secret its arguments why a program of targeted killing is constitutionally defensible, but, even with the white paper out in the open, the full opinion is still classified and may be read only by intelligence committee members. That should make clear that the rights claimed for the President are far more incendiary than in the summary.

The white paper sets three requirements for what it deems lawful “lethal force in a foreign country” against “a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida [government spelling] or an associated force”. That license to kill specifically includes “an operation against a U.S. citizen”. The target must (1) “pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, (2) capture is infeasible…and (3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles”.

The program immediately runs aground with the word “imminent” — is the government hoping we will believe there were hundreds of plots afoot when it eliminated the hundreds so far killed? — so the memo is at pains to expand imminent’s meaning beyond recognition. In a speech last March, Attorney General Eric Holder said imminence does not require knowledge of a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests. If the U.S. believes that the target has in the past been involved in violent activities and has not renounced such activities, that has come to mean "imminent" and justifies an attack.

Similarly, as apparently capture is almost never attempted, the question of what are the criteria that determine infeasibility arises? This is a reversal of the Bush-era practice, where drones — not then so fully developed — were used less and capture used more. But now, avoiding risk to American personnel seems universally to decide the matter.

Those who press for capture — or who ask why don’t we first offer surrender — seem clueless about the harrowing prospect of dropping special operations troops into remote and forbidding patches of Pakistan or Yemen and then extracting them safely after a… Read More »

Mortal After All, The Shine Comes Off Military Brass »

A welcome fallout from the Petraeus affair is that voices have come forth suggesting that we not idolize our military leaders quite so unreservedly. Unlike

the opprobrium heaped by some misguided elements on those who fought in Vietnam, we have honored the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan deservedly this time around. But there are those that say we have taken this too far.

Their criticism is not of units who have done the hard and hazardous work of our two wars — frontline units from brigade level on down are generally credited with adapting well to these insurgency wars and getting done the job assigned to them. Our mistake, say a number of military commentators, is to adore the generals along with them. Paul Yingling, for one, now retired but then a U.S. Army colonel who served three tours in Iraq,… Read More »

Defense: Are We Cutting Too Close to the Bone? »

In January of this year, President Obama announced a revamping of the military that entails budget cuts of $487 billion across ten years. Before leaving office last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates had already trimmed several hundred billion dollars by shutting down costly weapons programs, notably the F-22 fighter. And beginning this January 2, barring further action, another $500 billion over ten years will be lopped off the defense budget by law.

That’s the consequence of the nation having walked to the brink of default in mid-summer 2011 after months of dispute over raising the debt ceiling. On August 2 of last year, when Treasury Secretary Geithner had warned that the United States would run out of cash needed to pay its bills, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Budget Control Act. It called for $917 billion in spending cuts but, out of an inability to reach agreement on further savings, it set up a congressional “super-committee” to do Congress’ job. Half Republican and half Democrat, the committee was given until that November to come up with a plan — or else $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years would be triggered automatically.

The committee failed, and else won out. The $1.2 trillion “sequester” splits the spending cuts between military and other discretionary expense. Which is why a cut of yet another $500 billion in defense spending lies in wait just past the New Year.

The three sets of cuts have caused Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to warn that the damage to national security will be “devastating”.

Governor Romney agrees. He wants to increase military spending to 4% of the Gross Domestic Product and add 100,000 more troops, although he has not specified why they are needed.

Others cite procurement as the greater need, vividly made clear in this passage from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by an American Enterprise Institute fellow:

Many of the Air Force's aerial refueling tankers predate human space flight. Training aircraft are twice as old as the students flying them. The F-15 fighter first flew 40 years ago. A-10 ground-attack planes were developed in the Carter years. And all of our B-52 bombers predate the Cuban missile crisis.

That same piece says, “We have to look all the way back to 1916 to find a year when the Air Force purchased fewer aircraft than are included in Mr. Obama’s budget request”.
Bi-plane, 1916

F-35, 2012 Others have somehow discovered that moment as fruitful for compar- isons: Mitt Romney points out that with 285 ships, ours is the smallest Navy since 1917.

But quantity is a peculiar metric to use, failing to take the hugely greater lethality of our smaller inventory into account. Not to mention the cost of modern weaponry, which we will: Today’s Nimitz class aircraft carriers run to $4.5 billion apiece. Even a destroyer costs $2 billion. The sticker price for each budget busting F-35 Joint Strike Fighter runs to over $200 million or so — and that’s without its share of R&D. Robert Gates asked, “Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the United States' battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners?”.

re-trading the deal

The sequester was the default that was agreed to by both… Read More »