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IPB - Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield. 20 JUN 2007

By Denizens on June 20, 2007 | | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (1)

Sy Hersh is at it again. There’s a lot in this piece to consider. Was Taguba given a fair shake? What’s the effect of putting assassination in play? Is it a CYA conspiracy like Hersch et al claim?

I dunno. But Abu Ghraib is the stink that just doesn’t wash off our hands.

Related: KingDaddy of Arms and Influence on ‘The Authority to Whack’

Cassie’s pre-empted me on this front though.
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Why did Sec. State Powell say that there was an active cbrn program in Iraq, and more importantly who told him it was solid info?(Fixed, 0945 20/06/07)
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One from Hidden Unities: Disposable People.
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The debate over ‘doing Iran’ continues, and some see it as a less than optimal strategy for getting the strategic outcomes we want.
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This is a reading list from The New Republic about Afghanistan in the aftermath of OEF. Might be of interest to someone we know around here. Maybe. Sorta.
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J over at Armchair has a less than glowing opinion about recent terror plots and recent anti-terror initiatives out in the state of NY.
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A look beyond simple cannon counting in relation to COIN can be found here.
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Just had to do this one. Had. To. It’s so odd, but you get to know what the fringe is thinking and saying so as to know how to deal with them, if you have to.
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Last one, I promise, is from PDA dealing with armed humanitarian intervention. An excerpt:

This contribution focuses on armed interventions on behalf of the international community, which differ from traditional peacekeeping missions (using "blue-beret" contingents) in at least one vital aspect: the role of lethal force. Whereas in blue-beret missions weapons have been normally (and ought to be) confined to personal self-protection, the kind of military expeditions discussed here cannot, as a matter of principle, rule out the use of force above the individual level. Indeed, they imply the systematic application of combat power, if necessary.
--ry

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Web Reconnaissance for 06/20/2007 from The Thunder Run on June 20, 2007 9:51 AM

A short recon of what痴 out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often. Read More

11 Comments

By MajMike on June 20, 2007 8:22 AM
ah yes, the Taguba report again. NOW do y'all believe me when i was saying there were various shades of grey in use when that document was printed in black and white?
 
By fdcol63 on June 20, 2007 8:35 AM
We wouldn't have to "do Iran" if everyone else in the "international community" were serious about holding Iran to substantial and effective economic and diplomatic sanctions. But as we saw with Iraq, this isn't happening because there are other countries who benefit economically and strategically by dealing with Iran and by isolating the US from the rest of the "international community". The war in Iraq was not just about removing Saddam and the threat he posed. Rather, the war and the effort to democratize and rebuild Iraq has been an important component of a larger strategy to avoid war with Iran - who has always been the greater threat - by changing the dynamics in the region, thereby encouraging the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs themselves and stopping Iran's pursuit of nukes. As is often the case, there is no "good" option here. Every day brings us closer to the point where we - the US and the rest of the world - must make a tough decision between these 2 options: 1) Do whatever we must to prevent Iran's acquisition of nukes. 2) Do nothing, and live with the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran that is governed by radical Islamic clerics who have conducted a proxy war against the US, Europe, and Israel via state-sponsored terrorism since 1979, and who have open declared that they will destroy both Israel and the US. Pulling out of Iraq before the mission is completed will ensure Iranian dominance in the region, destroy any remaining US credibility, and nullify any hope of changing the dynamics in the region to the extent that the Iranian people will take the risk to revolt against the clerics. Rather than providing any long-term peace, pulling out of Iraq prematurely will leave us NO OTHER OPTION than a large-scale military confrontation with Iran.
 
By ry on June 20, 2007 8:56 AM
Okay, went back to read Barnett's post again. Not seeing much where he disagrees with fdcol wrt Iraq and purpose of doing it. but is there the possibility to use the momentum of change in the ME purchased with OIF and OEF to do a soft kill on Iran? That's the question. Is it a self fulfilling prophecy? If we treat them like bastards will they act like bastards, or if we treat them like a mature, responsible nation will they live up to that? Barnett's banking on this being a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not sure I agree with him. BUt that's the point. We could take a 25 year period and watch someone like Boris Yeltsin sit atop a tank as his forces conduct a coupe that's less whackaddo than who they oust. We could do that rather painlessly for us, and and everyone still gets to trade with Iran. I will say this though. If you look at India and PRC's need for energy it becomes apparent why the don't g.a.f. about sanctions. Going along with any sanctions regime puts them into a big time recession, if not depression. We're talking about survival of the country level here. It makes sense why they do it. Don't mean i like it, but the reasons for it are known and quite logical.(unlike India pursuing a 'Third Way' policy back in the day, which made no sense at all really) Does it have to be a hard kill to get what we want or can we get it by soft kill? Barnett says Iraq had to be hk but Iran can be sk. I'll take the soft kill if I can get it.
 
By fdcol63 on June 20, 2007 10:00 AM
ry, I'm with you ..... I'd certainly take a "soft kill" if we could get it, and I'd love to watch Iran implode like we saw the Soviet Union did. But I don't think the 2 situations are comparable enough to give me hope that that will happen. I think there are serious differences that will mitigate against this. Your "soft kill" approach is, IMHO, what we've been pursuing already .... trying to encourage the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs themselves by promoting democracy in the region on both their borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan - rather than attacking outright. However, even in the best case scenario, I don't see the mullahs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to go as "quietly into the night" as the draftee Red Army did. Let's not forget that by the time Yeltsin could sit atop that tank in Moscow and speak up for the Russian people during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, the USSR had been going through years of: 1) post-Afghanistan malaise; 2) the changing culture of perestroika" and "glasnost"; 3) economic hardships due to inability to match the US military build-up under Reagan; 4) a crumbling Soviet Empire as the Iron Curtain fell, Germany was reunited, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved. All of these factors contributed mightily, IMHO, to the confidence the Russians had in rising up against the Soviet government, and giving us a "soft kill" agianst our Cold War nemesis. In contrast, what do we see happening in the Middle East today, with respect to Iran and Islam? And what would happen if the US withdrew from Iraq before things are stabilized there?Would we even have the TIME, before Iran's mullahs acquire nukes, to continue to hope for a "soft kill" - whatever that is in THIS case? What I see is a very hostile, militant Iran and radical Islamic crazies who aren't being checked adequately because the West is too afraid of: 1) Appearing "intolerant" to their medieval barbarism and culture. One would think alleged "progressives" who constantly rail against the "totalitarianism" and "narrow-mindedness" of the modern Christian Right would also vehemently oppose a medieval Islamic culture where the Church and State are integrated, women and minorities are treated as 2nd class citizens, and homosexuals and fornicators are hanged or stoned. 2) The terrorism that they will send to our own shores should we continue to "offend" them and/or defend ourselves and other democracies in the region, like Israel. Let's wake up: this is already happening. Instead of a collapsing regime, we see a surging Iran that is effectively thumbing its nose at the world, pursuing their own nukes and aggressive foreign policies with the knowledge that no one has the will to stop them, and that few countries COULD, even if they had the will. They are effectively using the liberal media and global anti-Semitism to further isolate both the US and Israel, and are effectively placing their terrorist proxies in control in the region, especially Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Gaza - and perhaps in the West Bank if Hamas continues its civil war there. Oh, sure, we can hope for a "soft kill" all we want. But the prospects are looking slim if we continue down our present course. And will evaporate completely if we pull out of Iraq prematurely. We are indeed living through the calm before a very nasty storm. Just my opinion, for what little its worth. LOL
 
By David M on June 20, 2007 10:03 AM
Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 06/20/2007 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
 
By Oldloadr on June 20, 2007 12:24 PM
I keep telling people this is the long war for the survival of Western Civilization. It will end when either A: all of the Islamists are dead or B: everyone still alive in the Western world are hitting the prayer rugs 5 times a day. That's their choice, not ours. However, someone needs to convince the liberals (SPs) that you can't stop someone from waging war against you by pretending the war doesn't exist (got that, John Edwards?).
 
By ry on June 21, 2007 5:06 AM
FD, that's kind of the point. Ask Kat-Mizzou(the author of Middle Ground) about Iran's economy. She's done a LOT more research on it than I have, and she's backed up indpendently by Barnett and another source that isn't easily linked to. They are in a very similar situation as when Gorby came into office and was forced to do the 'Opening and Renewal' stuff that lead to the USSR implosion. And SovUn was a major market then too. China, India, much of the ME and other third world countries bought Russian. The conditions are kind of there. Maybe we can manipulate those conditions to our advantage without increasing negative feedback loop? We've still got about 5 years before they have a device they can put atop a rocket. We lose nothing by trying this 4 four years---except maybe the leadership willing to pull the trigger, but life's always a crap shoot that way, innit? Loadr, okay hammer me for being a nitwit who's never faced the elephant but you're talking about a strategy that Liddel-Hart would be absolutely against. You've put their backs up against the wall and given them no option but to fight without quarter. Kick balls between ears if you must, but at least leave them a pathway to back down. Nobody here pretends that the war doesn't exist---even if it isn't head-to-head physical yet. It's just a question of how to proceed in the prosecution. Long and soft or medium to long and kinetic.
 
By Oldloadr on June 21, 2007 5:42 AM
ry - If you were talking about any other group/religion/nation you would be right. The Islamists started the jihad in 1979 and they are not going to stop until they have achieved domination. It’s unfortunate that it took our civilian population/political leaders until 2001 to realize we were at war. Now, the Islamists are quite good at saying the things Western ears expect to hear, but I think the events in Gaza the last few days should convince even the greatest skeptics that we are not dealing with an enemy that sees the world the way we do. As mentioned some time ago here, the Islamists may make up only 10% of Islam, but that 10% is 100,000,000 people. Like I said, it's their choice to continue the jihad and they will, no matter what we do. We can fight them in the sandbox, we can fight them in Kansas, or we can all give up ham sandwiches; those are the only 3 choices the Islamists intend to give us. The events in Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq prove to me that you cannot separate the discussion of Iran the country from discussion Islamists.
 
By Oldloadr on June 21, 2007 7:10 AM
ry - BTW, I was making an aside to the oft heard liberal view that if we just redeployed back to CONUS, the war would peter out and terrorism would be a law enforcement issue. I know that none of the Denizens hold this view, but it's a view that is out there and, IMHO, a very dangerous view. It's the view that got us Lebanon (1983), Berlin (1986), Khobar (1996), etc. I realize that realpolitik will not allow the choice I prefer (lot's of B-52s/B-1Bs producing lots of glass beads in Iran), but if we take the softer approach, it still won't change the Islamists' grand strategy. We also have to remember something else that is part of their collective nature: they see time as on their side. 1993 (first WTC bombing) to 2001 seems like a long time to our Western, microwave mentality, but to them it's the same as half-time at the Super bowl. If we disengage, they are patient and will wait until our guard is down once again, and deliver another devastating attack.
 
By fdcol63 on June 21, 2007 7:55 AM
ry, " ... We've still got about 5 years before they have a device they can put atop a rocket. We lose nothing by trying this 4 four years ... " There are 2 major problems with your assumption here: 1) "5 years" - based on WHAT, and WHOSE, intelligence? The fact is ... we don't know for sure just how much time we have. But historically, because intelligence gathering and analysis is not a pure science and because there is always a certain amount of interpretation and guess-work involved, we have usually underestimated the capabilities and timelines of our adversaries. In this case, I'd rather err on the side of caution, and do what we can to control the situation ON OUR TERMS, not Iran's. 2) "Atop a rocket" - Wow! So you think the only major threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is from rockets, either theater-based tacticals or ICBMs? Personally, I disagree. There's the issue of Iran arming their terrorist proxies with larger nukes carried in a truck, across Israeli or European borders, or in a boat into someone's major harbors or up a river, like the Danube - straight into the heart of Continental Europe, London, or even DC. There's also the issue of "nuclear blackmail". A nuclear Iran, armed with just a basic, old-style device like Fat Man or Little Boy, will not be deterred at that point by any threats of the use of conventional forces, and this will change the balance of power in their favor in the region, leaving us with few, if no, options. We might as well pull out of the region entirely now, and give them the keys. TIME is the issue, indeed. I'd like to do as you wish, and sit back and let them implode like the old USSR, but I don't think we have that much time. As Oldloadr says, we're comparing apples and oranges when we try to draw any parallels between the old USSR and the radical, militant Islamic nutcases in Iran and their fellow travelers.
 
By ry on June 22, 2007 11:17 AM
"So you think the only major threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is from rockets, either theater-based tacticals or ICBMs?" In a word, yes. Sure, the Sovs claimed to have had a suitcase sized device. Thing musta weighed 80kg or so. Real obvious. And that's mostly rumor. Vaporware. Nobody to my knowledge has ever produced a copy of this thing. Having worked in transportation at one point in my life I know that there's all kinds of people who will look the other way for a little scratch, but smuggling fissionables is not an easy thing to do. It's heavy. To do so safely requires a real bulky case. Without it you run a real good chance of getting sick, not to mention even the most uneducated pee their pants when they hear radiation in my experience so it's not like there's a long line to my left of people waiting to transport this stuff. Not to mention that the Iranians have had a devil of a time paying people to come build their facilities. They've only recently(last 5 years) gotten things up to speed so they can produce any HEU, much less enough for a real bomb. And with forensics being what it is, they'd have to have a farkin' death wish to hand some off to someone to sneak it into the country and detonate. Even a weathercock pres like either Clinton would have no choice but to take the gloves off when the material was traced back to Iran. As I read it, Iran's thinking of nucs as deterent. Deterent to us hitting them or interjecting ourselves into their little sand box. When I was growing up people said the same things about the Sovs as Loadr is saying about the far more nebulous 'Islamicists'. They're so different from us. They won't ever stop until we're all singing the praises of (now it is allah, but then it was Stalin, Lennin, and Marx). Yadda, yadda, yadda. That didn't turn out that way, now did it? Most people here probably thought at the time it would come down to how fast REFORGER could be pulled off. You have to at least entertain the idea that they aren't the Orcs of Isengard or minions of Sauron and evil to the core, but instead rational actors(in the game theory def'n of the term) and how to manage their desires so as to not have them be a major thorn in our side(that can range from carpet bombing to lucrative trade deals). Whose intelligence? IAEA. The boys and girls over at Armscontrolwonk. Knowledge that it isn't simply having material so much as having a tested device that you know works and will survive atop the rocket. As we've seen with DPRK simply having the fissionables does not a nuclear force make. Sneaking or launching a dud is stupid beyond measure since it gets the same treatment as one that worked. And if you follow the Iranian project you wind up following a path that leads to Libya, from Libya to Pakistan, from Pakistan to DPRK, from DPRK to PRC. DPRK device didn't work. Pakistan's did. Libya hasn't done a test and Iran hasn't either. Deduction: they don't have a tested device that they can put on a rocket or in a 'suitcase bomb', and as DPRK shows simply having the same plans of a tested device doesn't mean you have certainty that you've done it right(it isn't like building carbuerators). As DPRK has shown, again, fissionables does not a credible atomic deterent make. And I'm tired of the panties in a bunch worries of nucs. That is simply not how terrs work(yet). J Sigger still works CBRN issues in an official capacity. Just not for the Army anymore. I'm with him that it's far more likely, because of the ease of transporting convetional explosives, that we'll see things more like the '93 WTC or OKC style things than a nuc device. YOu can hide it on a cargo ship of course, but not easily in a rad proof container(lead is bulky and heavy). Given time it takes to transit either the Pacific or Atlantic, or even waterborn passage from some Moslem central Asian republic, the crew will get sick, tipping off people what was up(setting up that ticking time bomb torture scenario). If you fly it? You're paying a ton for extra weight---not to mention that more and more places have radiological sensors like Narita in Japan does in their baggage handling. It just isn't as easy as people see on TV and in movies. Guys trying to sell 20g of material get detected and busted rather easily---Romanian a few years ago tried. Not to mention the Lugar effort to secure much of Russia's stockpile(which has been hit and miss, in all honesty). No, I'm pretty confident in the assesment that a suitcase nuc is a low probability(non-zero, but vanishingly small). Which means the biggest threats is rockets for nucs by Iran. In a terrorist capacity their biggest threat to us stems from the material support in the form of money and sanctuary. Look at the stats for a Shahab. Liquid fueled. You can't leave those babies fueled up all the time. Takes in the neighborhood of 20 minutes to fuel. Minute they have a succesful underground test we can still go totally agro with an air campaign that garauntees(as much as anything ever can) that they never get to light a rocket off. It's still a big jump from having something you can blow up underground the first time to one you know will survive ballistic flight. I wouldn't be opposed to something like an 'El Dorado Canyon' on steroids. Or one on steroids that was repeated every 4 months for X number of years. But there are other options that can be pursued before we do that. Good lord they've only got 1000 centrifuges of their cascade able to work at any one time, the damn thing crashes when they try to work it any more than that. Handling it on our time, to our advantage, does not mean doing it when we aren't ready or able to capitalize on an effort. We aren't in a position yet which we can call ready or able to capitalize on a raid of facilities. hitting them just to hit them buys us nothing and costs us much. That's the point. We can try the sk approach for a while yet and still have the 'hit them' option viable. We can still do 'containment' while getting ready for a possibly necessary 'roll back'. It's just not that simple really. "old-style device like Fat Man or Little Boy," These won't survive delivery. AD is to nasty these days for something to deliver something like those. A LACM maybe, but not that. Armorer will have to referee if we go into that realm since he's actually played with the suckers in real life. It's just not as simple as hit them or don't hit them right now. It is slowly converging on such a binary option, but even engagement at this point does not necessitate such a binary choice. You don't go into a crowded bar and yell 'wanna fight' to nobody in particular. It just isn't smart or productive.