Wampum

Monday BRAC fast

The Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey is apparently on the BRAC list, along with the Portsmouth Yard and the Brunswick Naval Air Station.

[Good morning region6.ang.af.mil, amedd.army.mil, monroe.army.mil, wpafb.af.mil, sheppard.af.mil, langley.af.mil, natick.army.mil, spawar.navy.mil, monmouth.army.mil, west.saic.com, ncnc.northcom.mil, larc.nasa.gov, psns.navy.mil, aero.org, * -sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, dfas.mil, *-quantico.nmci.usmc.mil, lead.army.mil, redstone.army.mil, gunter.af.mil, itsd.state.ms.us, travis.af.mil, detrick.army.mil, losangeles.af.mil, ncsc.navy.mil, redstone.army.mil, npt.nuwc.navy.mil, belvoir.army.mil, ria.army.mil, navsea.navy.mil, cannon.af.mil, scott.af.mil, kirtland.af.mil, lia.army.mil, nps.navy.mil, drms.dla.mil, pica.army.mil, amedd.army.mil, *-hawaii.nmci.navy.mil, uslec.net, tobyhanna.army.mil, nhchasn.med.navy.mil, usar.army.mil, *-norfolk.nmci.navy.mil, wecnq.com, amc.af.mil, patrick.af.mil, hill.af.mil, jfcom.mil, wapa.gov, altus.af.mil and wcsh6.com and spb.sovintel.ru (which really is in Moscow, I can see their packets going into a hole at 2 Krasnokazarmennaya Moscow 111250). I'm publishing while writing so we can enjoy each other's company to the fullest.

Later adds due to non-existant in-addr.arpa delegations: OCNR-1, VA (yup, and AISC-9 can fix that for you), AISC-9, Fort Lee (yup, I can fix that for you and OCNR-1, I renumbered hq.af.mil...), URRAD, Texarkana, Presidio of Monterey (howdy neighbors), SDSAN Anniston, HCSSA San Antonio, General Dynamics and some more contractors. ebw]

Who would have thought that the NeoCons could co-opt the pseudo-altruistic good-government (cut fat and meat) and the pacifist (cut meat and bone) theories of defense policy, readiness, and procurement, and wipe out -- not the Bad Guys in {Kabul,Baghdad,Tehran,Pongyang}, but the Gingrich Generation in the House?

I'll try and keep this simple. Not my strong suit. The guy who said (mix of paraphrase and quotes) "air and special ops takes Afganistan and Bin Laden", "100,000 troops takes Iraq and no post-hostilities planning necessary" and "You go to war with the Army you've got", wants to do to the Navy (but not the Air Force) what he's done to the Army. Since 1945 the Army and the Navy have had their CONUS bases, and more importantly, their institutional centers of doctrinal development, the War Colleges and the Charm Schools, and their European and Pacific Commands. Rumsfeld's goal is to transform these stable institutions into situational ad-hoc commands. Restated, the military is not only subordinate to civilian government on the core policy issues of war and peace, but the military needs no institutional capacity to reason about warfare distinct from that civilian leadership. If you don't already know what "compression of the sensor to shooter loop" means in all its fullness, you may want to reflect on the institutional capacity to reason about warfare distinct from domestic party and faction.

A lot of garbage has been written about some New American Way of War, but most of it is cover for generational competition (there is a publish-or-perish regime in military academia too), marketing collateral from technology vendors, and golly-gee-invincibility messaging for the Hill and media. What's new is the current state of the relationship between fire and maneuver, the changing nature of close air support, the compression of the sensor to shooter loop, and important coalition and jointness issues, and as I pointed out earlier in the essay The Importance of ... Doing Nothing, the strategic reality that the US is engaged in something profoundly different from the first Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

From Walking Backwards, on the covert motivations of factions within the Bush regime.

As Dwight points out in discussing Professor Bainbridge's dubious reasoning about the Filibuster, the essence of the doctrine of judicial review [of Executive acts] is espoused in an unbroken line of cases beginning with Marbury vs. Madison. Institutional independence of law enforcement began with two Special Agents appointed in 1908 by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and for the Civil Service generally, in the Progressive Period. Since before Elizabeth I, the professional class have dominated the political class in the English, and American Navies. Since Cromwell's New Model Army, in England, and later the States, merit mostly prevails over purchase of command. It has never before, in the history of the Armed Forces of the United States, been necessary to create professionalism by an Act of Congress, to limit Congress, or the Executive, from taking field or fleet.

Institutionally, the transformation at hand is the extension of faction from electoral politics to the Army, and now the Navy. The faction is, from my perspective, the assendency of Oliver North's "asymmetric forces" nonsense -- a subject of disacord in a Naval Post-Graduate School staff and Litton defense contractor household -- the force structure representation of predatory colonial wars of resource extraction, and the defense tech sector looking for more aero-space dollars, and the so-called "wise men" who make up the uniformed part of the 4% of GNP defense spending crowd.

I know, I'm getting obscure again. Suppose you don't care that the military is pithed, either because you think the threat model is reduced, or you just care about local bases, or some other reason to be indifferent to a major part of the budget and policy and patronage pies. How are the NeoCons (plus the co-opted pseudo-altruistic good-government and the pacifist national voter blocks) wiping out the Gingrich Generation in the House, not the Bad Guys in {Kabul,Baghdad,Tehran,Pongyang}?

The BRAC is supposed to isolate evaluation from politics, a noble goal. However, this BRAC is conducting an evaluation that is "in a box Donald Rumsfeld has built". It is a box that contains no deterence mission for a Navy transformed from Blue to Brown (Blue Water Navy vs Brown Water Navy for the Google strings), no potentially hostile symmetric forces in Europe, East Asia, or at Sea anywhere, and is the kind of thing people used to get really concerned about -- a first strike weapon. A MIRVed, days to impact conventional force, co-incidently retaining all of its real nuclear war fighting capabilities. Not the best toy to give to an idiot.

Ultimately, it is Congress, and not the Pentagon, that decides what the Military is, and how and where it is used. There is no clause in the War Powers Act that allows the Executive Branch to commit the United States to ad hoc asymmetric adventures and ignore symmetric challenges, or to assume that the Wars of 1990 and 2002/3 in West Asia against militaries functioning at or below the 1950s level of operational art and material preparedness, repeated, is the Challenge of the Future.

from Coming to what's left of Maine near you

No monies will be "saved" by base closures. Funding will simply move from line items that Donald Rumsfeld values less, to those he values more. The box that Donald built is an overt assault on the House as the defense appropriations authorizing body, and it makes the use of force more, rather than less likely, and you are on your own dear reader if you think Special Ops and satellites will find the non-state opfors better than InterPol. If you didn't vote for Bush, or you didn't vote for Rumsfeld, but you buy Rumsfeld terms and conditions, you voted for him, and you voted for Bush. This is about as political as it gets. This is the electric acid kool-aid test, and the wounded only get bayonetted.

Time to change out of PJs, the uniform of the unwashed and unemployed, and go play with kids. Having taken courses at both the NPS and Berkeley, both in things that go "bang", how to drive boats, and engineering/maths, I find the rational offered for the closure of the NPS to be ... faith based. [I appreciate the diligence of the nps.navy.mil reader collecting the linked set. ebw]

Oh. So why not the AF? I still need to write that up -- an analytical paper on strategic targeting of national power systems, and more generally, civilian infrastructure. In days we'll all know if all those obsoleted ICBM silos and B-52 bases are on Donald's list of things to get rid of by the mid-terms, or not.

Google keys: BRAC list

correction: The hit from a Moscow-based intel service was unrelated to the domestic BRAC ballet. It was about the Iranian domestic reform dance (line dancing minus the Texans).

213.221.61.114 114.spb.sovintel.ru wampum.wabanaki.net [09/May/2005:12:33:02 -0400]
"GET /archives/001040.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6957 
"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=hashem+aghajari"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"

Posted by EBW at May 9, 2005 08:26 AM | TrackBack