Tag Archives: military

Middle East War Suddenly Getting a Lot More Warlike

by Kristin98I Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m a little behind on the news right now, but it sure looks like things are getting a whole lot hotter in the Middle East. Here are a few headlines:

Saudi Jets Strike Yemen in Bid to Halt Houthis

Tikrit airstrikes draw U.S. into battle between militants and Iraqi forces

Obama Says He Will Delay Withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Afghanistan

Iran-backed rebels loot Yemen files about U.S. spy operations

U.S. Role in Middle East Revamped Amid Chaos

That last headline comes from the Wall Street Journal, and seems to sum things up pretty well. The story includes this:

Kenneth Pollack, the former CIA analyst, said the military campaign in Yemen is unlikely to have a positive effect on the country’s fractured dynamics.

“The idea that this is going to produce some kind of a peaceful settlement is ridiculous,” Mr. Pollack said. “The more likely outcome is it just prolongs the stalemate.” The Persian Gulf countries could consider the use of ground troops to make progress, which should be a concern for the U.S., he said.

What could go wrong?

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Middle East War Suddenly Getting a Lot More Warlike

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Marco Rubio Has a Peculiar Idea of How to Defeat ISIS

by CarmelaSilvers Posted on February 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Steve Benen points me to Marco Rubio today. Here is Rubio explaining how his ISIS strategy would be different from President Obama’s:

“ISIS is a radical Sunni Islamic group. They need to be defeated on the ground by a Sunni military force with air support from the United States,” Rubio said. “Put together a coalition of armed regional governments to confront ISIS on the ground with U.S. special forces support, logistical support, intelligence support and the most devastating air support possible,” he added, “and you will wipe ISIS out.”

Hmmm. As Benen points out, this sounds awfully similar to what Obama is already doing. Local forces? Check. Coalition of regional governments? Check. Logistical support? Check. Air support? Check.

But there is one difference. Rubio thinks we need a Sunni military force on the ground to defeat ISIS. The Iraqi army, of course, is mostly Shiite. So apparently Rubio thinks we should ditch the Iraqi military and put together a coalition of ground forces from neighboring countries. But this would be….who? Yemen is out. Syria is out. That leaves Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. Does Rubio think these countries are willing to put together a ground force to invade Iraq? Does he think the Iraqi government would allow it?

It is a mystery. What exactly does Marco Rubio think?

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Marco Rubio Has a Peculiar Idea of How to Defeat ISIS

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Scott Walker Blows It Again: Asked About ISIS, All He Has Is Bluster

by SoilaAnnunziata Posted on February 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at National Review, conservative blogger Jim Geraghty joins the crowd of pundits who are unimpressed with Scott Walker’s recent answers to fairly easy questions:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker received a lot of completely undeserved grief from the national news media in the past weeks. But he may have made a genuine unforced error in one of his remarks today. Asked about ISIS, Walker responded, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Let’s put aside the question of whether Walker deserves any grief for his weasely comments about evolution and President Obama’s love of country. Fair or not, those actually seem like the kinds of questions presidential candidates get asked all the time. If Walker wants to be taken seriously, he should have better responses then he did.

But hey—maybe those really were gotcha questions and Walker should get a pass for answering them badly. ISIS, by contrast, certainly isn’t. It’s one of the preeminent policy challenges we face, and if you’re aiming for the Oval Office you’d better have something substantive to say about it. As Geraghty suggests, generic tough-guy posturing does nothing except show that you’re out of your depth.

At a broader level, the problem is that although Walker’s anti-union victories are a legitimate part of his appeal and a legitimate part of his campaign story, he’s become something of a one-note Johnny about it. His supposed bravery in standing up to union leaders and peaceful middle-class protestors has become his answer to everything. This is going to get old pretty quickly for everyone but a small band of die-hard fans.

Needless to say, it’s early days, and Walker’s stumbles over the past couple of weeks are unlikely to hurt him much. In fact, it’s better to get this stuff out of the way now. It will give Walker an improved sense of what to expect when the campaign really heats up and his answers matter a lot more than they do now.

That said, every candidate for president—Democrat and Republican—should be expected to have a pretty good answer to the ISIS question. No empty posturing. No generic bashing of Obama’s policies. No cute evasions. That stuff is all fine as red meat for the campaign trail, but it’s not a substitute for explaining what you’d actually do if you were president. Ground troops? More drones? Getting our allies to contribute more? Whatever it is, let’s hear it.

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Scott Walker Blows It Again: Asked About ISIS, All He Has Is Bluster

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Will Stonewalling Work For Bill O’Reilly in Falklandsgate?

by ClintonSNUX Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at the mothership, David Corn and Daniel Schulman report that Bill O’Reilly might have a problem with the truth that’s surprisingly similar to Brian Williams’. Basically, they both seem to have a habit of exaggerating their war-reporting prowess. In Williams’ case, it was about a helicopter during the Iraq War. In O’Reilly’s case, he’s repeatedly said that he was “in a war zone in Argentina” during the Falklands war, but in fact he was never anywhere near the actual war. He was a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires:

O’Reilly did see some action in Argentina— just not war action. He writes in The No Spin Zone that shortly after he hit Buenos Aires—where CBS News had set up a large bureau in the Sheraton hotel—thousands of Argentines took to the streets, angry at the military junta for having yielded to the Brits.

As he tells it in his book, O’Reilly, then 32 years old, raced to cover the event: “A major riot ensued and many were killed. I was right in the middle of it and nearly died of a heart attack when a soldier, standing about ten feet away, pointed his automatic weapon directly at my head.” A television cameraman was trampled, journalists were banged up, and O’Reilly and others were teargassed. “After a couple of hours of this pandemonium,” he recalls, “I managed to make it back to the Sheraton with the best news footage I have ever seen. This was major violence up close and personal, and it was an important international story.”

Now, even this might be a bit of an exaggeration—click the link for details—but put that aside for the moment. It’s pretty obvious that a protest, even a violent protest, isn’t a war zone or anything close to it. O’Reilly can bob and weave all he wants, but no one is going to buy the idea that covering a protest in Buenos Aires is anything like reporting from a war zone.

Nonetheless, I suspect we’re about to witness an interesting phenomenon. In the case of Brian Williams, NBC caved in to pressure pretty quickly and suspended him for six months. It’s possible that his career is over. In O’Reilly’s case, the response so far has been (a) silence from Fox News and (b) a torrent of insults and abuse from O’Reilly. And my guess is that it will work. The Williams case generated a ton of commentary. So far, the O’Reilly case has generated very little. As long as both Fox and O’Reilly stonewall, it will probably stay that way. It will be a momentary squall and then it will blow over.

Stonewalling often works. We’re about to find out if it will work here.

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Will Stonewalling Work For Bill O’Reilly in Falklandsgate?

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The American Public Is Becoming Ever More Rabid for War Against ISIS

by MerissaCpo Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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It sure isn’t hard to gin Americans into a war fever. President Obama isn’t even trying, but support for sending U.S. ground troops back into Iraq to fight ISIS continues to grow. According to a new CBS News poll, it now stands at 57 percent.

It’s not just conservatives, either. Democrats favor sending in ground troops by a margin of 50-43 percent. We’re only a few public beheadings away from two-thirds approval margins among all groups, which is something of a magic number. If we reach that point, President Obama and congressional Democrats might decide—reluctantly or otherwise—that they have to change course and send in a substantial ground force.

This would probably be a disaster. The most optimistic scenario is that Graeme Wood is right, and the ISIS folks are such nutters that they’d welcome a final, conventional showdown against the forces of the West:

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo….It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.

….Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse….If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

That’s a battle we could pretty easily win. But if it turns out the leadership of ISIS isn’t quite as daft and millenarian as Wood says, then the only way to defeat ISIS would be in grisly house-to-house fighting in Sunni strongholds like Mosul. We already know that U.S. troops can’t do that effectively, and neither can the predominantly Shia troops controlled by Iraq. It would be a long, grinding, disaster of a war.

But apparently the American public hasn’t quite internalized that yet. They’re becoming more and more enraged about ISIS, and they want to do something. That’s a bad combination.

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The American Public Is Becoming Ever More Rabid for War Against ISIS

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Republicans and Democrats Are Both in Favor of Approval to Fight ISIS

by HallieFrederick Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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So what does the public think of President Obama’s request for an authorization to use military force against ISIS? According to a new NBC/Marist poll, they’re basically in favor:

Greg Sargent has a partisan breakdown, and approval of the AUMF is surprisingly bipartisan: 60 percent of Democrats approve and 52 percent of Republicans approve. So I imagine this is going to pass before long, probably without too many major changes.

The poll has some other responses that are a bit odd. Only 45 percent of the respondents have much confidence in President Obama’s strategy, but 66 percent think we’re going to be able to defeat ISIS anyway. Is this a triumph of partisanship over actual belief, or the other way around? Or just the usual incoherence you get in practically every poll about everything?

In any case, it will be interesting to see what line Fox News and the rest of the right-wing punditocracy take on this, and whether this affects future poll results. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a much bigger partisan split on this question a couple of weeks from now.

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Republicans and Democrats Are Both in Favor of Approval to Fight ISIS

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Russia, Ukraine Reach Cease-Fire Deal—For a Few Days, Anyway

by Bridget60A Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

After a marathon session, we now have another cease-fire in the Russian war against Ukraine:

The cease-fire is scheduled to begin at midnight on Saturday, but the 13-point compact appeared fragile, with crucial issues like the truce line left unresolved. Over all, there seemed to be no guarantee that the problems that marred the cease-fire agreement reached here in September had been ironed out.

The very fact that it took more than 16 hours of intensive negotiations to reach an agreement, and that the leaders announced the accord in three separate news conferences, seemed to highlight a certain lack of unity.

….“Despite all the difficulties of the negotiating process, we managed to agree on the main things,” Mr. Putin said. Those issues included the withdrawal of heavy weaponry, a promise for constitutional change, and “special status” for the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, he said….The deal calls for heavy artillery to be withdrawn at least about 15 miles from each side, and the biggest missiles even farther. The withdrawal is scheduled to start two days after the cease-fire and to be completed within two weeks.

Needless to say, this doesn’t sound all that promising, especially that business about “special status” for Donetsk and Luhansk. However, the talks produced at least one concrete accomplishment:

The White House has said it will await the outcome of the cease-fire bid before making a decision on whether to send arms to Ukraine’s military — a move strongly opposed by Moscow.

Ukraine also got something out of the deal: the IMF announced a $17.5 billion loan to Ukraine, which will keep them from going bankrupt. The Guardian notes that the talks nearly broke down before Thursday’s announcement:

The negotiations appeared extremely tense and highly combustible with simmering hostility between Putin on the one hand and Merkel and Poroshenko on the other. At various points during the night, the talks looked close to collapse, with Poroshenko leaving the negotiating table and talking of being confronted with “unacceptable conditions”.

Overall, it looks to me like Russia got more out of this deal than either Ukraine or Europe. A lot depends on whether Russia really withdraws its heavy artillery and keeps it withdrawn. Like everyone else, I have my doubts. This seems more like a chance for Russia to regroup and set conditions on the ground than it does a real agreement. We’ll see.

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Russia, Ukraine Reach Cease-Fire Deal—For a Few Days, Anyway

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

by EmilWUNhxbb Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican hawks have insisted from the start that President Obama isn’t being tough enough in his approach to the Ukraine crisis. And perhaps he isn’t. It’s a point that’s arguable by reasonable people.

But what’s not arguable is that regardless of what Obama would do if he had a truly free hand, he pretty clearly doesn’t have a free hand. Ukraine is, first and foremost, a European problem, and the leadership of Europe just isn’t on board with a more aggressive strategy against Russia:

Through nine months of struggle to halt Russia’s military thrust into Ukraine, Western unity has been a foremost priority for American and European leaders. Now, with the crisis entering a dangerous new phase, that solid front is in danger of collapsing.

….A growing number of U.S. officials, and some in Europe, particularly in countries bordering Russia, believe that the only way to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing what they see as an invasion of Ukraine is to raise the military cost to Moscow. That means giving the Ukrainians better weapons, they say.

….But the Germans, French and many other European leaders are equally convinced that arming the Kiev government will not halt Putin, but will increase carnage in a war that already has killed about 5,300 people and risk an all-out East-West confrontation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, made clear that not only would Germany not contribute arms, but it also opposed allies doing so. “Military means will lead to more victims,” she said, arguing that the West should apply a patient containment approach toward Russia.

I’m skeptical about providing arms to the Ukrainians, but I remain open to arguments that it’s the only way to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression. However, there’s just no way that this will work without European cooperation. End of story. The US can’t pretend that acting on its own has even the slightest chance of success.

So the hawks need to stop obsessing over Obama’s alleged weakness, and instead look overseas. The truth is that Obama has been one of the most aggressive of the Western leaders in the fight against Putin, while it’s Merkel and her colleagues who have insisted on a less confrontational approach. If John McCain and his buddies want to arm the Ukrainians, they need to figure out a way to persuade Merkel that it’s the right thing to do. That might be less congenial for their tea party buddies, whose interest in Ukraine is pretty much zero aside from its role as a way of painting Obama as a weak-kneed appeaser, but it’s the only way they might get what they say they want.

So that’s their choice. Continue bashing Obama, which feels good but will get them nowhere. Or start pressing our European allies, which is boring and difficult and pays no political dividends—but which might actually get them closer to what they claim is their goal. Which is it going to be, boys?

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

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Here’s Some of the Dumb Stuff People Did With Drones Last Year

by Constantinee9g Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

Thanks to the federal intelligence employee who got buzzed and crashed a remote-controlled quadcopter on the White House grounds earlier this week, there’s a renewed interest on drones’ potential to cause mayhem.

Last November, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a list of 193 incidents of “drone misbehavior” (as the New York Times put it) reported to air traffic control officials in 2014. The list didn’t include incidents reported to law enforcement, so it’s not necessarily comprehensive. But it does offer a glimpse of the challenges of incorporating flying robot vehicles into everyday life.

Some highlights from the report (see the full list at the end of this post):

Drones and sports: There were more than a half-dozen incidents of people flying drones near crowded sporting events. Drones were spotted near games at the University of Arizona in Tucson; Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee (twice); Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin; the Big House in Ann Arbor during a University of Michigan game; FedEx Field during a Washington REDACTED game; and Citi Field during a Mets game.

Drone strike: Of all the incidents listed in the FAA report, just one involved a drone striking a person. In October, a small drone flying low over the Daytona Beach Municipal Stadium struck “a citizen causing (a) minor abrasion.”

Close calls: One of the obvious concerns is that some yahoo (or even a skilled pilot) will fly drone into a aircraft with actual people on board. The FAA report lists several close calls and near misses in 2014. On September 30, the pilot of an inbound regional jet reported a flying device that almost hit the plane at 4,000 feet, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. In August, a medevac helicopter in Las Vegas reported almost getting hit by a drone at 200 feet as it was trying to leave a hospital. In June, a helicopter pilot in Stockton, California, reported almost hitting two remote controlled gliders at about 750 feet. And in March, a pilot in Tallahassee, Florida, said he almost struck a “remote controlled aircraft” while flying at 2,300 feet. One pilot had to take evasive action in the skies above Oklahoma City in October when a two-foot wide drone came within 10 to 20 feet of his plane at roughly 4,800 feet.

High altitude: There are at least 18 incidents involving drones flying above 4,000 feet, with some as high as 15,000 feet. (Most of the drones available to the general public fall into the FAA’s Model Aircraft category, which means they’re supposed to stay under 400 feet.) In a report from last May, a pilot approaching LaGuardia Airport reported seeing a 10- to 15-foot-wide drone at 5,500 feet above the southern tip of Manhattan.

Grounded: In August, a pilot was arrested after getting stuck in a tree at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC after climbing up to retrieve a crashed drone.

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Here’s Some of the Dumb Stuff People Did With Drones Last Year

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Last Year America Sent Special Ops Forces Into Almost 70% of the Countries in the World

by ChetCastiglia Posted on January 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that elite US Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed.

On December 6, 2014, approximately 36 of America’s top commandos, heavily armed, operating with intelligence from satellites, drones, and high-tech eavesdropping, outfitted with night vision goggles, and backed up by elite Yemeni troops, went toe-to-toe with about six militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it was over, Somers was dead, along with Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher due to be set free the next day. Eight civilians were also killed by the commandos, according to local reports. Most of the militants escaped.

That blood-soaked episode was, depending on your vantage point, an ignominious end to a year that saw US Special Operations forces deployed at near record levels, or an inauspicious beginning to a new year already on track to reach similar heights, if not exceed them.

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, US Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries—roughly 70% of the nations on the planet—according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker. Only a day before the failed raid that ended Luke Somers life—just 66 days into fiscal 2015—America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.

Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans. Unlike the December debacle in Yemen, the vast majority of special ops missions remain completely in the shadows, hidden from external oversight or press scrutiny. In fact, aside from modest amounts of information disclosed through highly-selective coverage by military media, official White House leaks, SEALs with something to sell, and a few cherry-picked journalists reporting on cherry-picked opportunities, much of what America’s special operators do is never subjected to meaningful examination, which only increases the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

The Golden Age

“The command is at its absolute zenith. And it is indeed a golden age for special operations.” Those were the words of Army General Joseph Votel III, a West Point graduate and Army Ranger, as he assumed command of SOCOM last August.

His rhetoric may have been high-flown, but it wasn’t hyperbole. Since September 11, 2001, US Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, including their numbers, their budget, their clout in Washington, and their place in the country’s popular imagination. The command has, for example, more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 today, including a jump of roughly 8,000 during the three-year tenure of recently retired SOCOM chief Admiral William McRaven.

Those numbers, impressive as they are, don’t give a full sense of the nature of the expansion and growing global reach of America’s most elite forces in these years. For that, a rundown of the acronym-ridden structure of the ever-expanding Special Operations Command is in order. The list may be mind-numbing, but there is no other way to fully grasp its scope.

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Last Year America Sent Special Ops Forces Into Almost 70% of the Countries in the World

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