While I was on August break trying to finish writing my book, Greg Jaffe, one of the most thoughtful defense reporters going, had a fine article that looked at the "patriotic''commericals that use our sentiments about soldiers to peddle beer. The article is rather discursive, but captures well the gap between today's new combat vets and the other 99 percent of society. I liked especially that Jaffe went to the creator of one of the ads and reported the guy's thinking.  

In a related piece, Chief Red Bull offers some useful thoughts on the do's and don'ts of greeting homecoming soldiers.

What a story! It turns out that four military personnel deployed to the U.S. Embassy to help with security and explosive ordnance disposal. For Fox, this apparently constitutes President Obama breaking his vow not to insert troops. The article actually begins, "Despite repeated assurances from President Obama and military leaders that the U.S. would not send uniformed military personnel into Libya …"

I wonder if one day having worked for Fox News during our time will be regarded like being a supporter of Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. I think Fox may be the most destructive force in American society nowadays, basically pouring poison into the stream of our political discourse.

(HT to a captain of the Marines)

By "A. Checklist Monkey"
Best Defense guest columnist

When I first read the commentary by Jörg Muth comparing the different command philosophy/command cultures of the Armies of Germany and the United States. I couldn't help but laugh. My very first thought was, "If he thinks the Army is bad, I wonder what he would think of the Air Force!" As a space and missile operations officer in the USAF, not only is the concept of Auftragstaktik foreign, any exercise thereof could possibly get you thrown in jail!

As an ICBM ops officer, I was trained from day one to not think for myself, to always follow checklists, and to never try and shotgun anything. Time and again in my training I was told to "Just follow the checklist," or "The checklist will take care of you." For the most part, they were right. Nearly 50 years of ICBM ops gives you a lot of time to work out the bugs in a system. If something went wrong out in the field with one of the missiles, and it was discovered that you made a mistake by not following your checklist, you were at risk of being relieved of duty, given extra training on top of your regular training, and having to go through the process of being re-certified to perform nuclear alerts again (a process that could take a day or several weeks depending on the severity of the error). You weren't allowed to think for yourself. You were trained NOT to.

There is a reason AF space operators call themselves "Checklist Monkeys." "Read a step, do a step, eat a banana," is a common quote thrown around in the space ops world.

Even when I was not out in the field sitting on alert, I experienced massive frustration at the micro-management and inflexibility of how life in the missile world was being run. When I was a 2Lt, I very quickly came to realize how nothing would ever change after I made a few suggestions about how the alert shift schedule could be worked better (a quality of life issue, I admit). I was told point blank: "Interesting idea, but forget about it because nothing's gonna change." He was right. In the nearly five years I was in my missile wing, nothing did. When it came to annual performance reports--in the AF we call them OPRs for officers, EPRs for enlisted--they had to be coordinated up to the WING COMMANDER. Not just signed off, mind you. I mean that the Flight, Squadron, Group and Wing levels all had to get their hands on that OPR/EPR, make changes, send it back down the chain so the changes can be made, and then send it up again for more review/changes before it was signed off. I had an OPR I wrote on one individual take THREE MONTHS to get approved. Auftragstaktik? What's that?

Read on

This blog turns out to be produced not by an individual but a collective. A friend asked me why I was not more bothered by the deception. I think it is because I consider it 90 percent artistic license and just 10 percent an integrity violation -- the 10 percent being the e-mails the group sent pretending to be an individual. So I am less upset and more just impressed that a group could consistntely produce prose with that power.

This is a piece I ran by the group.

As the chickens come home to roost in London, Joe Nocera captures well the symmetric nature of the Murdoch scandal.

It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys. There has always been a rough edge in good journalism, but these people have acted like thugs -- a point seemingly lost on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal as it comments on its owners. I agree with pretty much everything Nocera writes. As with other major scandals, I am struck not only by how we never know what is going to happen next, as Nocera says, but also, how in retrospect each step seems inevitable. 

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, essentially accused the Pakistani government of beating a journalist to death in May. "It was sanctioned by the government," he said.

There is an interesting parallel here to the murder of Danny Pearl back in 2002. He was killed by al Qaeda in Pakistan. Saleem Shahzad was killed by the government of Pakistan, Mullen is saying.

Also, the New York Times reports that there is new evidence that the Pakistani military sold nuclear weapons technology to North Korea.

Again, I wonder why anyone thinks Pakistan should still be considered an ally.

Meanwhile, Karachi continues to writhe with political violence. For reasons I don't understand, the Edhi Foundation's ambulances are being attacked.

He also was a critic of the ISI.

I take it the State Department is still arguing that we should continue to play along with Pakistan because there we have no other choice. I think we do have a choice.

"Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers?"

Dowd can be too light sometimes, but for my money she is one of the sharpest writers around, worth reading just for the technical sharpness.

It will be a better world when we can no longer see headlines like that. I am amazed that Castro has hung on so long. I suspect that our embargo has helped keep him in power.

Cuba may be the sleeper that becomes a very big story in the next few years. Americans have been cut off from it for so long that they think it is a small island. It is not. 

These things always sound better in French, don't you think? It is from the "libre de penser" pages of the newspaper Le Devoir of Canada. Francophones are big on pensing -- have you ever noticed how in France, even the corporate executives look like philosophy professors? Bonus is the byline: "Serge Truffaut," which sounds like it was made up by a writer for Saturday Night Live.

Anyway, I say: La méfiance est mère de sûreté.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a lot of admiration for the work of David Ignatius -- both his columns and his novels.

So I was surprised to see his denunciation on the deployment of armed drones to Libya. He thinks that in the Arab world they have become a symbol of targeted assassination.

Perhaps so. But deploying them in Libya is a sign that the U.S. is not bugging out on its NATO allies nor on the Libyan rebels, who are Arabs.

Frankly, I am surprised it has taken the U.S. government so long to get the Predators over Libya. They should have been there on Day One. This is exactly the type of move that makes sense here: Putting U.S. assets into the operation in support of an intervention led by other members of NATO, but supported by the United States, especially in areas where the U.S. can offer unique capabilities, especially when U.S. aircrews are not endangered by the deployment.

In this case, I can see many more uses for drones than the assassination of Col. Qaddafi, which Ignatius figures is their likely use. We have seen Qaddafi's forces adapting to the presence of NATO aircraft overhead-for example, moving from tanks to pickup trucks. So closer observation is needed before striking. That requires getting down low, but that can sucker a NATO aircraft into getting hit. Drones are a good answer to this tactical problem. Likewise, they can get down under clouds in bad weather, taking away from Qaddafi's goods the advantage of attacking under overcasts. Plus, drones can "loiter" over a target, which helps both with observation and deterrence. They even can harass the foe-on exercises at the Army's National Training Center, I once was with an "opposition force" ambush team that crouched down warily when they head that lawnmower-like buzzing of a drone somewhere overhead. They hated that noise.

My question is, What took so long to make this move? I worry that the national security establishment -- the Pentagon, the CIA and even State Department-are slow-rolling this mission a bit, foot-dragging by "defining terms" and "seeking legal clarification." I know the military doesn't much like the Libyan intervention, and worries about mission creep. But they are supposed to follow legal orders. Part of this slow response probably has been President Obama's fault, because he was very cautious to act and then when he did, he emphasized U.S. minimalism. That sort of nuance runs contrary to U.S. national security culture, and so may have thrown some sand in the gears. Still, fellas, he is the president, so let's be careful about shirking. If your conscience can't take it, you know where the door is. 

Meanwhile, here's an interesting take on Libya from retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who I think has appeared in all three of my non-fiction books.  

And here is Sebastian Junger's meditation on the loss of his friend and Restrepo collaborator Tim Hetherington in Libya. Worth reading

Tim Hetherington, whom many Best Defense readers know from his film Restrepo, was killed yesterday in Libya along with Chris Hondros of Getty.

This compelling note from C.J. Chivers hits pretty close to home. I know too many stories like this, particularly one about a war reporter who was shown her the body bag holding her dead husband, also a war reporter. Her first reaction was, that couldn't be him, he isn't that short. He had been in a car that hit a land mine and his legs had been blown off.  

From C.J. Chivers' terrific blog from Libya: "A quick note: we have a terrible satellite connection here, and that and the ongoing battle beside the building we are working in has made swift updates difficult."

If the Pulitzer board doesn't give this guy something eventually, shame on them.

(I'd give Abu Mook a HT on this but I wrote it before I saw his item on same.)

I was on Meet the Press yesterday, following Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates. I was struck at how frequently they emphasized the short-term, limited nature of the U.S. action in Libya, and how they used the past tense to discuss it: 

Gates: "I think that the no fly zone aspect of the mission has been accomplished."

Clinton: "I think we've prevented a great humanitarian disaster."

Gates: "we see our commitment of resources actually beginning to -- to decline."

Gates: "in terms of the military commitment, the president has put some very strict limitations in terms of what we are prepared to do."

Gates: "I don't think it's [Libya]  a vital interest for the United States. But we clearly have interests there.  And it's a part of the region, which is a vital interest for the United States."

I also was struck at how much more assertive Clinton seemed than Gates. A friend of mine calls this "State's War."