NetWars

Al Qeada Not Drivers of Taliban Insurgency

Interesting bit from John McCreary's always reliable Night Watch:

"U.S. drone strikes have killed 11 of Al Qaeda's top 20 leaders across Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in the past six months, Asian News reported, citing a report from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The report states the ISI has started to help the U. S. effort to track and kill al Qaeda and Taliban militants as an attempt to improve Pakistan's global image. The report did not mention whether those leaders had been replaced. Al Qaida is still functioning, in that the attacks continue, so apparently they have.

The number is impressive if accurate, but that kill ratio proves that al Qaida leaders are not the key drivers in the Afghan insurgency which surged far past 2007 levels of violence during the same period."

Defense Spending Boosts the Economy? Data Says, Not Usually

As policymakers in Washington desperately search for ways to resuscitate America’s moribund economy a popular meme is taking hold that higher military spending can help boost the economy. Is that true? Theory aside, the historical evidence is not so clear.

Even House Republicans appear to be jumping on the spend defense money bandwagon, apparently eager to show they remain “strong” on defense. The GOP spokesman, Josh Holly, sent out a response to the initial Obama plan to cut 10 percent from the defense budget with this pop quiz:

Pop Quiz: A $55 billion cut in defense spending during a time of war and tough economic times will:

a) Improve America’s ailing economy,

b) Hurt America’s ailing economy even more,

c) Haven’t considered the economic implications or number of jobs that will be lost yet, or

d) Not sure.

While the answer would seem to be obvious from Holly’s very rigged choices, the answer is not so simple. The general idea is that when the government increases military spending through borrowing or printing money, it boosts aggregate demand for goods and services. One of those pushing this line is Martin Feldstein, professor of economics at Harvard, and a former Reagan administration economic advisor, who says a chunk of military spending should go into the stimulus plan being debated by Congress. “If rapid spending on things that need to be done is a criterion of choice, the plan should include higher defense outlays, including replacing and repairing supplies and equipment, needed after five years of fighting. The military can increase its level of procurement very rapidly,” he wrote in a Jan. 29, Washington Post op-ed.

Hybrid Enemies - A Primer

For the past fifty years, the military has sized, trained and equipped its ground forces to battle a conventional, mechanized, tank heavy opponent, organized in companies, battalions and brigades, with supporting artillery and aircraft. Training scenarios envisioned a repeat of World War II tank battles, Army units were run through simulated armored clashes in the open deserts at its premier training ground, the NTC at Ft. Irwin, Ca. Now, at its training centers, the Army, and Marines also train for urban counterinsurgency.

That the Army’s big-battle mindset hasn’t gone far, despite eight years spent fighting two counterinsurgency wars, can be seen in this article on the Small Wars Journal web site by an Army captain who recently completed the captain’s career course and had this to say: “With rare exception, the exercises which hone officers’ skills in these areas are focused on the conventional Fulda gap-style battle… Despite all that has been written about third-generation warfare (Blitzkrieg) and fourth-generation warfare (state vs. non-state), we operated largely in the second generation of warfare.”

A small group of strategic thinkers are flexing their intellectual muscle, and a new opponent model is taking shape against which America’s ground forces will be configured to fight (with the Marines way ahead of the Army). Called “hybrid” enemies, they come equipped with high-end, precision guided weapons, yet fight in distributed networks of small units and cells more akin to guerrillas. One of the leading scholars in this group, Frank Hoffman, who advises the Marines and is a researcher at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, says hybrid wars, “blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare.” Theory moved to reality when Hezbollah, equipped with loads of advanced missiles and skillfully using urban terrain, fought the Israeli army to a stand still in 2006. Hezbollah, Hoffman says, “is representative of the rising hybrid threat.”