FIGHTING ISIS - Battlefield and OnLine

"Fighting ISIS, on the battlefield and online" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Is the U.S. making headway in the fight against the Islamic State group?  Judy Woodruff talks to retired Col. Derek Harvey, a former Army intelligence officer, and Brendan Koerner of Wired Magazine, about the military offensive against ISIS, including the killing of a senior leader, and the resiliency of the group on social media.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, spoke this morning at the Pentagon about the fight against the Islamic State.  While hailing operations to kill top ISIS leaders like the one we reported earlier, they sought to put the longer war in context.

ASHTON CARTER, Secretary of Defense:  There's no question that this individual and other individuals we have eliminated have been part of the apparatus of ISIL to recruit and to motivate foreign fighters, both to return from Iraq and Syria to countries in Europe and elsewhere, and also simply by using the Internet and other communications to do so.

Even if it's just inspiration, it still takes you back to Iraq and Syria and the need to eliminate the sources of that inspiration.

GEN. JOSEPH DUNFORD, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff:  While ISIL has not been able to seize ground in the past several months, that hasn't precluded them from conducting terrorist attacks, and it hasn't precluded them from conducting operations that are more akin to guerrilla operations than the conventional operations that we saw when they were seizing territory.

So, I think the momentum is in our favor.  I think there's a lot of reasons for us to be optimistic about the next several months.  But by no means would I say that we're about to break the back of ISIL or that the fight is over.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Dunford and Carter also spoke of expanding the role of U.S. Marines in Northern Iraq and the possibility of sending more forces in the coming weeks, adding to the nearly 4,000 already there.

We examine the state of the fight against ISIS now with retired Army Colonel Derek Harvey.  He was an intelligence officer and special adviser to the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus.  He's now a professor at the University of South Florida.  And Brendan Koerner is a contributing editor at “Wired” magazine.  He's the author of an upcoming article about ISIS and its use of social media.

JOINT CHIEFS - Interview With Chairman Gen. Dempsey

"Joint Chiefs chairman Dempsey on Ukraine, military sex abuse and budget cuts" PBS NewsHour 3/7/2014

Excerpts

SUMMARY:  Judy Woodruff interviews Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey at the Pentagon about the escalating risks of the Ukraine crisis, finding a balance between budget reduction and military readiness, the uncertain future of the United States in Afghanistan and the increase of sexual assaults and misconduct within the armed forces.
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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Well, speaking of the budget, the administration announced just — and the Pentagon announced just a few days ago that there’s going to be a — or that you would like to have a downsizing of materiel and troops back to a size that we haven’t seen since before World War II.

Because of what’s going on right now in Eastern Europe, any second thoughts about that?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY:  Well, I’m not sure that if we had a million-man Army, that it would make — would have made any difference in the Russian calculation to enter the — to enter Ukraine.

But, that said, we do have an obligation to deter conflict and to prepare for it should it occur.  And we are reaching a point, because not only the depth of the budget reductions, but also the mechanism, the draconian way it’s applied, where we really can’t move money around or balance the budget in any responsible way, that is affecting our readiness.

So, if you’re asking me, you know, does this increase the urgency with which I articulate the risks that we are beginning to accrue, sure, it does.

MILITARY - Farewell Admiral Mullen

"Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen Bids Farewell After 40 Years of Military Service" PBS Newshour Transcript 9/30/2011

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): A farewell to one of the most influential military leaders in modern U.S. history.

Kwame Holman has that story.

KWAME HOLMAN (Newshour): His four years overseeing the U.S. military have taken Adm. Mike Mullen around the world many times over, meeting with troops in two war zones, attending elaborate military ceremonies in China, coordinating disaster aid in earthquake-stricken Haiti.

But Mullen's greatest role was in helping wind down the war in Iraq and expand the war in Afghanistan. At his Senate confirmation hearing in 2007, he expressed characteristic candor about Iraq.

ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN, Joints Chiefs Chairman: Based on the political -- lack of political reconciliation at the government level, obviously, although I spoke earlier about some of it going on at the local level, which I think is important, I would be concerned about whether we'd be winning or not.

KWAME HOLMAN: On Afghanistan, Mullen played a bigger role, saying the U.S. needed to refocus its energies there and in the region. When President Obama asked for an Afghan war review, Mullen stuck by commanders in the field who demanded resources for a counterinsurgency approach.

David Ignatius of The Washington Post has traveled to the region frequently with the admiral.

DAVID IGNATIUS, The Washington Post: There is this view that the White House has that Mullen and the military kind of boxed the president in, and narrowed their options and pushed them down the road toward this 30,000 troop surge.

It didn't look that way to me as I was reporting it. It looked more like a kind of classic chain of command thing.

KWAME HOLMAN: In his final words to Congress last week, Mullen called out Pakistan for aiding the Haqqani terrorist network in recent attacks in Afghanistan.

ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN: The Haqqani Network, for one, acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's internal services intelligence agency.

KWAME HOLMAN: Mullen made 27 trips to Pakistan during his tenure, cultivating a relationship with top military officials there, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. That relationship became strained after the killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces inside Pakistan.

Kayani received no heads-up from Mullen, nor did the Pakistani government know of the raid on the compound in Abbottabad.

Ignatius says the Pakistan relationship has been a bitter pill for Mullen.

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, he'd go out to see Kayani. It sometimes seemed, every few weeks, he was flying halfway around the world to Pakistan.

I went on a number of those trips with him. And I'll tell you, it's a long way to go for what was often a meeting of just a few hours. But Mullen put in the time and believed that he was making progress.

KWAME HOLMAN: Adm. Mullen's tenure at the Pentagon may be best remembered for his strong advocacy for ending the military's don't ask, don't tell policy. For 18 years, it barred homosexuals from serving openly. It ended last week, 18 months after Mullen spoke out.

ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN: No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

I salute you Admiral.

MILITARY - Petreaus Retires

"Petraeus Retires, with a Warning" by ELISABETH BUMILLER, New York Times 8/31/2011

An era in the American military came to an end on Wednesday when David H. Petraeus, the most influential general of his generation, retired with a 17-gun salute and a warning that coming budget cuts should not lead to the “hollow Army” that occurred after the Vietnam War.

Just 11 days before the 10th anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s attacks on New York and Washington, General Petraeus also implicitly cautioned that the United States should not abandon the troop-intensive and expensive counterinsurgency doctrine that was his hallmark when he commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The general spoke as the Obama White House is shifting from a broad counterinsurgency strategy of trying to build roads, schools and good government in Afghanistan to a narrower and more secretive counterterrorism mission of hunting down terrorists.

General Petraeus said that the United States should keep counterinsurgency as a doctrine – he helped write the military’s updated manual on it in 2005 and 2006 – if only because war is unpredictable and the military needs to be trained for all possibilities.

“We have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we’re most prepared or most inclined,’’ General Petraeus said at the retirement ceremony, held in the bright sunshine of the parade ground at Fort Myer, near Arlington National Cemetery. “Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.’’

General Petraeus, 58, will arrive on Tuesday in a civilian business suit as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His last day in uniform, after 37 years in the Army, was not only a turning point in his own life but also in the military, signaling the end, or so President Obama hopes, of the wars that defined the first decade of the 21st century. General Petraeus has told friends that going to the CIA will still keep him “in the fight’’ –perhaps as much as if he had stayed in the military, given the Obama administration’s move toward covert operations.

The job he really wanted, General Petraeus has told friends, was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Mr. Obama chose a less celebrated and far less public military man, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the current Army Chief of Staff. It was General Petraeus himself who then raised the idea of going to the CIA, an agency he knew as an avid consumer of American intelligence in Baghdad and Kabul. Mr. Obama named General Petraeus as his CIA chief in April, and although General Petraeus did not have to retire from the Army to take the job, he chose to do so in order to draw a line between the military and intelligence worlds.

General Petraeus’ retirement ceremony, held on a warm morning with light breezes and little humidity, was a reunion of sorts for the military and civilian veterans who had worked with him during the troop surges he oversaw in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zalmay Khalilazad, a former American ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan who was born in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was there, as was Meghan L. O’Sullivan, the Bush White House’s deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan and a onetime aide to L. Paul Bremer III, the former top American civilian administrator in Iraq.

From Afghanistan came Mark Sedwill, the NATO senior civilian representative there, and from Pakistan came the ambassador to the United States, Hussein Haqqani.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was there as a host and showered General Petraeus with superlatives, at one point even comparing him to the great generals of American history – Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“You now stand among the giants, not just in our time, but of all time,’’ Admiral Mullen said.

Members of General Petraeus’ 1974 class from the United States Military Academy at one point lustily chanted “Peaches, Peaches, Peaches’’ – the general’s nickname at West Point. General Petraeus’ two children and his wife, Holly Petraeus, were there as well. General Petraeus thanked Mrs. Petraeus for being “Mrs. Dad for the bulk of the last decade while I’ve been deployed.’’

I slut you sir.

WAR ON TERROR - Change in Focus? About Time!

"Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq" by Thom Shanker, New York Times

Excerpt

The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.

The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command.

The suggestion was raised in a session last week convened by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional war-fighting commanders. While still under review, its supporters, including some in the Army, argue that a realignment could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.

As described by officials who had been briefed on the closed-door discussion, the idea represents the first tangible new thinking to emerge since the White House last month endorsed a plan to begin gradual troop withdrawals from Iraq, but also signals that American forces likely will be in Iraq for years to come.

It's about time we get the "War on Terror" focused where it should have been all along. Before Emperor Bush made Iraq the rallying cry for terrorists world-wide.

POLITICS - War Information Room, Propaganda Tool or Not?

"Pentagon Setting Up War Information Room" by The Associated Press, New York Times

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Shaping the Bush administration's message on the Iraq war has taken on new fervor, just as anticipation is building for the September progress report from top military advisers.

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad -- serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

According to a memo circulated Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant defense secretary for public affairs, is looking for personnel for what he called the high-priority effort to distribute Defense Department information on Iraq.

The move -- requested by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England -- comes as administration officials are gearing up for a rash of reports on progress in Iraq and recommendations from the military on troop levels going into next year. The key report will come from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

Other reports are expected from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, retired Gen. James Jones -- who will examine the progress of the Iraqi security forces -- and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, which will review whether the Iraqi government has hit security and political benchmarks outlined by Congress.

The Pentagon dismissed suggestions that the communications desk will be a message machine or propaganda tool, and instead said it is being set up to gather and distribute information from eight time zones away in a more efficient and timely manner.

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Less than a year ago, Smith developed plans for teams of people to ''develop messages'' for the 24-hour news cycle and ''correct the record'' when news agencies put out what the Pentagon considered inaccurate information.

There's more in the full article

So, propaganda machine or not? Considering the propensity of the Bush Administration, I'd bet on the side of propaganda (aka correct the record) machine as far as actual operation.

IRAQ - Powell's Opinion

"Powell: We Are Losing In Iraq" Former Secretary Of State Says More Troops Are Not The Answer, CBS News

The United States is losing the war in Iraq but sending more troops to Baghdad is not the best way to change course, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Face The Nation.

Powell said he agreed with the assessment of the Iraq Study Group co-chairmen, Lee Hamilton and James Baker, that the situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating," and he also agreed with recently-confirmed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that the U.S. is not winning the war.

"So if it's grave and deteriorating and we're not winning, we are losing," Powell told Bob Schieffer in an exclusive interview. "We haven't lost. And this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around."

President George W. Bush is considering several options for a new strategy in Iraq. The most likely choice would be to send tens of thousands of additional troops for an indefinite period to quickly secure Baghdad.

A 3,500-man brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division will be sent to Kuwait soon after the holidays, CBS News correspondent David Martin reported on Friday. The troops would be available immediately should the president order a surge into Iraq.

There are about 134,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now.

Powell, also a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not see the military benefit of flooding Baghdad with American troops.

"I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work," he said, adding that the Iraqi government and security forces must take over.

"It is the D.C. police force that guards Washington, D.C., not the troops that are stationed at Fort Myer," Powell said. "And in Baghdad, you need a police force to do that, and in the other cities, you need a police force to do that, and not the American troops."

Another voice of reason that I doubt Bush will actually listen to.

I admit, I'm pessimistic. Even now you can see the virtual claw-marks-on-the-floor as Bush is being dragged by many to change his policy in Iraq, which in Bush's eyes = "I was wrong." Am I the only one who has noted how dragged-out and tired Bush looks of late? This is a man who still resists, with all his might, the admission that he could possibly be wrong. In the end I think Bush will choose a policy on Iraq that will pay only lip-service to a policy change. His "new" policy will be only window-dressing.