"Imagine," commented my friend Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, whom I know from Iraq, "the reaction of Hamilton and Madison to a proposal to borrow money from China to invade Mesopotamia for the purpose of bringing democracy to Arabia."  

That struck me as really smart,  underscoring the distance between our nation's recent actions and the ideals on which the nation was founded. But wanting a second opinion, I asked another friend, Eliot Cohen, erstwhile consigliore to Condi Rice. He shot back:

Yup. That would be the Madison who, immediately (and I do mean immediately, literally within a few weeks) after concluding the war that he had foolishly launched  against Great Britain -- an exhausting, dispiriting, bankrupting war with the world's only superpower, in which the White House got burned to the ground, our coasts were blockaded, and our efforts to invade Canada, forsooth, repeatedly crushed, secured another declaration of war from Congress and launched the entire United States Navy across the ocean to settle scores with the Sultan of Morocco, the Dey of Algiers, and the Pasha of Tripoli.  And don't get me started on Hamilton."

Who do you think has the Founding Fathers right, Yingling (professor of security studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany), or Cohen (professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC)?  

I've just finished reading Lee McCardell's Ill-Starred General, a biography of General Edward Braddock, commander of the British expedition destroyed by the French and their Indian allies just east of what is now Pittsburgh in July 1755. To my knowledge, this was the largest battle seen in North America up to that date.

What is striking is how Braddock blew off warnings from both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that he was spending too much time worrying about logistics and not enough studying his enemies. The general figured the Indians would scatter the first time they got a gander at crack British regulars. He also thought he could take the French outpost at what is now Pittsburgh in a few days and then proceed to Niagara. He was wrong on both counts.

The vastly outnumbered French figured they would lose if they waited to be attacked, so instead of hunkering down or retreating, they ambushed Braddock's column while it was still in the woods. Interestingly, Daniel Hyacinthe Liénard de Beaujeu, the French commander, much savvier than Braddock about local affairs, went into battle dressed more or less as an Indian and seems to have fought like one until he took a bullet in the head. Two-thirds of Braddock's force was killed or wounded. Bonus fact: Daniel Boone also was at the battle, at least until he and other wagoneers hightailed it out of there.

Read on

Hats off to Army Maj. Gen. George Davis, who vigorously objected to waterboarding and other forms of torture. He wrote that:

No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the ‘water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; she he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

Fwiw,  General Davis made that comment in September 1902, when he was the senior lawyer in the Army. He is quoted in the new, Winter 2010 issue of Army History magazine. 

My friend Jamie Hailer just published a book about Marine Raiders in World War II, titled Our Kind of War.

Check it out. If Ken Burns were dead, he'd roll over in his grave.

A couple of weeks ago, I carried a post about a speech Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (and to Iraq, and to the United Nations) gave about the Afghan economy. Today Zal checks in with a response to that post and a subsequent one from Kabul:

Two weeks ago when I spoke at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies one of my points was that creating a functional economy and improving living standards are as important to success in defeating the enemy as our military effort. I argued for leveraging the purchasing power of the NATO and ISAF forces to stimulate the Afghan economy-encourage the creation or strengthening of Afghan businesses and putting more Afghans to work. We did this successfully in Korea and Japan and we can do in Afghanistan -- where last year unemployment was estimated at 40%.

One development worker on the ground -- the director of the Peace Dividend Trust, a non-profit international NGO operating in Afghanistan -- in a letter to Tom Ricks stated that it was already happening. Tom in turn shared the letter on his blog at Foreign Policy.

It is true that some progress has been made because of the "Afghan first" policy. The Department of Defense is considering ways to do more. However, the steps taken-which I applaud-are very small compared to the potential, and it is this potential that I was talking about the other day and will be addressing in more detail here.

Read on

Here CWO2/Gunner Keith Marine recommends less shooting, more assaulting:

Fire Discipline and marksmanship fundamentals. Got to get your guys to buy in to only shooting at targets. I think we did a good job of this but there were some units who got engaged by an estimated enemy force of fire team size and managed to shoot 4 magazines per man for a platoon -- complete horseshit. I think everyone realizes that the enemy generally does a good job of selecting firing positions with a decent amount of cover and concealment. If 4 guys are shooting at you, probably not 4 or 5 guys from your side can identify the positions.  In addition, the guy who is waiting for a target will see a Marine shooting at a random bush or window and believe that's where the bad guys are and add his fires to the mix, next thing you know you have an entire squad/platoon dumping rounds into an empty bush or window and there is so much fire from your side of the canal, you don't know if or where fire from the other side is coming.

This boils down to training, unit discipline, and whether or not the individual Marines have combat action ribbons. Suggest you speak with the officers and convince your commander that if an incident appears where a platoon shoots a few thousand 5.56 and some rockets at an estimated 3-4 enemy, while rapidly turning in CAR requests a preliminary inquiry should soon follow with some punitive action.  The guys who only shoot at targets and employs his weapon systems to his advantage will overwhelm and defeat these clowns over here every time.  The guys who sit back and shoot a lot, while awaiting fire support, just make noise and waste money and convince the Taliban to continue attacking.      

A little news item on Christmas Eve jumped out at me: The Fort Hood shooter wrote to his radical Islamic cleric pen pal to ask what Islamic law says about Muslim soldiers in the American military who kill their comrades. Hmm -- you think that was a warning sign?

By coincidence, the pen pal cleric may have been killed in an airstrike.