By Donna McAleer

Best Defense giant slalom correspondent

Forget the creepy guys in trench coats -- the Penn State University and the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals remind us that it's harder than you might imagine to identify sex offenders inside institutions. Put that perpetrator in military uniform or clerical apparel and we want to deny it is even possible. Be it renegades, robes or uniforms, rape is the betrayal of trust manifest.

U.S. servicewomen are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a solider than they are likely to be killed in the line of fire. The new battlefield is the barracks.

The Invisible War, a documentary film premiering at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, is an investigative and enraging emotional analysis of the epidemic of rape and sexual assault within the U.S. military. If the term "epidemic" seems strident or alarmist, the facts chillingly reveal that sexual assault and rape are prevalent and that the military justice system presently in place is an enabler that shockingly perpetuates the crime. It is not an abberration. In fact, the closed military justice system is a target-rich environment for a sexual predator.

The 2010 Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military indicates that 3,158 cases were officially reported. A Department of Defense survey of active duty members revealed that only 13.5 percent of sexual assaults within the services were reported. The Pentagon itself estimates that more than 19,000 incidents of sexual assault actually occurred in 2010, not the 3,158 officially reported.

Invisible War vividly portrays the intense and extreme personal and social consequences that result from these brutal crimes. This is not only a woman's story, it is a man's story. Rape is a crime of power and violence. Within the military, this is a troop welfare issue. Within society, this is human rights story.

The academy-award winning team of Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering and Geralyn Dreyfous deliver an powerful film that makes a strong call for fundamental change in the way the violent crimes of rape and sexual assault are handled. Fully aware of the explosive nature of the topic, the filmmakers' overriding agenda is to provide a positive portrait of our armed forces and a balanced account showing how the services, through addressing the issue of rape and sexual assault within its ranks, could better realize and support the men and women who proudly wear our nation's uniforms.

The film treats this traumatic and highly charged issue in as balanced a manner as possible. The crimes are real and their consequences are devastating, but this documentary is not a hatchet job. The producers and directors have done an admirable job getting on-screen interviews with a number of civilian experts in the field, politicians, and retired officers up to and including the rank of lieutenant general.

Through the drama of the survivors of rape and sexual assault, The Invisible War offers a possible solution to the epidemic-a change to the military justice system in how cases of rape and sexual assault are investigated, prosecuted and punished. The call is to take them out of the survivor's chain of command. Canada and the United Kingdom along with most of our NATO allies, no longer allow military commanders to determine the prosecution of sexual assault cases.

Today military law requires that the officers directly in charge of the offenders decide how these cases are handled. This creates a clear conflict of interest and as a result, in the vast majority of sexual assault cases charges are not proffered. Only 8 percent of sexual assault cases are prosecuted and only 2 percent are convicted.

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By Eric Hammel
Best Defense guest columnist

Over the past year, I've worked the vast security implications of global climate change into a few comments on The Best Defense, but they haven't taken hold. I cannot fathom the prevailing so-what attitude as the FEMA-grade weather disasters mount toward becoming serial and routine occurrences. It's here now, for all to see.

Tens -- perhaps hundreds -- of millions of heat, drought, flood, and famine refugees are probably going to be shaken loose within a decade. (Some estimates say half of humanity -- 3,000,000,000 people -- will have to move or die just from heat-related causes.) Thanks to topsoil erosion via drought and helped along by deadly, unstoppable tornado clusters and unlivable ambient temperatures, the bulk of farming in North America will shift northward and most likely will become restricted to a narrower band in the upper Midwest and on into higher Canadian latitudes-assuming there is sufficient rainfall there. Sea-level rise from melting glaciers on land will soon be poised to shake loose uncountable refugees from drowned coastal regions, where most of the world's people live. If the warm North Atlantic conveyor current is halted or recedes southward due to desalinization via the Greenland freshwater ice melt, the Canadian Maritimes, New England, and northwestern Europe will probably experience unbelievable winters and might (this is counterintuitive) freeze over.

Global famine is going to force the use of our military as a police force organized to feed unknowable masses of people (until cold reality sets in as reserve food stocks evaporate). I believe that North America's first up-close brush with famine-motivated mass migration will take place in northern Mexico and on into the U.S. border states. (Refugees fleeing in the wake of the collapse of Mexico's central government could precede drought- and heat-related dislocations. Are we prepared to handle such a dress rehearsal?)

The only force on Earth with the inherent capability to police, process, house, feed, and move refugees on a mass scale is the U.S. military, but, though its reach is global, its capacity and stamina are nonetheless limited, probably to one or two major disasters at a time, not the overlapping rolling meta-disaster climatologists predict. (Remember, the only components of the Katrina effort that worked at all were the military responses, beginning with Coast Guard helicopters.)

The implications for military use alone in the looming weather-related crises are mind-boggling, but no one appears to want to face up to them with an action plan, a doctrine, a list of precepts. I find it worrying to the nth degree that there is absolutely no public discussion. Have the relevant agencies studied it all already-and thrown up their hands? I already know from a series of phone calls to relevant local and state agencies that there is no actual integrated plan in place to respond to high-impact earthquakes in major California population centers. The "plan" is to play it as it lays. And I sincerely doubt that a repeat of Katrina would be met with an effective plan based on lessons learned.

Can we bring this out of the shadows, and least in this venue?

Eric Hammel has written more books about the U.S. military in Vietnam, Korea and World War II than most people have read.

I think Gen. Martin Dempsey really hit it out of the park in Tuesday's hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Here is his meditation on two of the big lessons he learned in Iraq.

So I would -- I would -- looking back on it, at least my own personal view about Iraq in 2003 was that Iraq had a particular problem, and it was a regime that was destabilizing in the region and that we should take action, that -- it was my recommendation that we should take action to change the dynamic inside of Iraq and that the region itself would become more stable. I'm not sure it turned out that way. I mean, it probably -- it is, but it didn't happen exactly as we intended it, and that's because I don't think we understood -- let me put it differently. I didn't understand the dynamic inside that country, particularly with regard to the various sects of Islam that fundamentally, on occasion, compete with each other for dominance in Islam, and so -- Shia, the Shia sect of Islam, the Sunni sect of Islam -- when we took the lid off of that, I think we learned some things that -- and I'm not sure we could have learned them any other way.

I don't know, I've reflected about that a lot, but I've learned that issues don't exist in isolation. They're always complex. And I've been scarred by rereading a quote from Einstein, who said if you have an hour to save the world, spend 55 minutes of it understanding the problem and five minutes of it trying to solve it. And I think sometimes, in particular as a military culture, we don't have that ratio right. We tend to spend 55 minutes trying to -- how to solve the problem and five minutes understanding it. That's one of the big lessons for me in developing leaders for the future, not only in the Army but, if confirmed, in the joint force.

Another one is the degree to which military operations in particular, but probably all of them, have been decentralized. You know, you'll hear it called various things: decentralized, distributed operations, empowering the edge. Whatever we call it, we have pushed enormous capability, responsibility and authority to the edge, to captains and sergeants of all services. And yet our leader development paradigms really haven't changed very much. They are beginning to change, but I think that second lesson on the enormous responsibility that we put on our subordinates' shoulders has to be followed with a change in the way we prepare them to accept that responsibility.

I think those would be the two big lessons for me."

He also referred to H.R. McMaster as "probably our best brigadier general." Good for him.

By Patrick McKinney
Best Defense department of Maghreb affairs

In late October 1956, British and French forces aided Israel's seizure of the Suez Canal from Egypt. In March 2011, an allied force including British and French forces intervened in Libya to establish a no-fly zone and protect rebels from the ruling Gaddafi regime. Half a century apart, these actions in North African defined trans-Atlantic defense. The Suez Crisis heralded an era of American leadership and action, while Libya has shown that, though powerful, America intends to rely on its allies to carry larger burdens, and take responsibility for their own regions. America once drove and financed western security, but due to fiscal shortfalls and a decade of conflict, it no longer intends to guarantee European security.

In 1956, the once-powerful European states were still weakened from the world war and faced forceful colonial independence movements. The French lost Indochina in 1954 and the situation in Algeria continued to deteriorate, while the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt was England's last foothold in the Middle East. After tense negotiations, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser threatened to nationalize the canal as sovereign Egyptian territory, and in response, Israel, England, and France coordinated an invasion with the pretext of securing the canal for world commerce. They failed to inform the United States of their intent and expected American support or indifference. To their surprise, they received neither.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower forcefully protested the Suez invasion and demanded that foreign forces withdraw from Egypt. Though he had little compassion for Nasser and his regime, Eisenhower intended to support international order and avoid unnecessary international conflicts. He condemned the invasion, saying, "We believe these actions to have been taken in error. For we do not accept the use of force as a wise and proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes." Israel, England, and France were surprised by the American response and false expectations of support. Their forces began withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone, and returned control to Egypt.

After the conflict, American authority and consent became pre-eminent in the Trans-Atlantic partnership.  Through NATO, America assured European defense from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, and American priorities were NATO's priorities. England lost its Middle Eastern influence and decided to influence western and world security through cooperation in its "special relationship" with the United States. Embarrassed and affronted by the perceived betrayal, France took the alternate path and sought to set its own defense priorities. France demanded a restructure of NATO leadership in 1958, and began the withdrawal of its forces from the command in the 1960s. France remained outside of NATO for more than forty years until operations in Afghanistan and officially returned its forces in 2009.

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I have nothing greatly illuminating to add about the shootings on Saturday, except that killing a little girl and a federal judge and shooting a member of Congress who is meeting with constituents feels to me like an attack on our system. They say the guy is crazy, as if that makes it inexplicable, but it still feels like a blow to the way of life we aspire to have. I wonder if the weekend felt like the 1935 shooting of Huey Long.

My question: At what point does the right to own a firearm begin to impinge on other people's rights?

OK, try it this way: At what point does the right of crazy people to buy weapons begin to seem crazy?

"The fundamental task of diplomacy is to strip policy of its ambiguity," Alexander Haig Jr. writes (70) in his memoir Inner Circles, which I am now reading. I just about fell out of my chair when I saw that. I wonder what Haig's old boss, Henry Kissinger, the grandmaster of strategic ambiguity, would say about that. Amazon's "look inside this book" function says that in his book Diplomacy, Kissinger uses the word some 29 times.  

Haig gets extra dumbass points for the brassy certitude of his assertion -- and for, a score of pages later, this assessment of the Shah of Iran: "I thought in 1961, and I still think, that he was as close to being a natural and sincere democrat as anyone I ever met in his part of the world." (90)   

More interestingly, Haig says he thinks that Fidel Castro was behind John F. Kennedy's assassination, and says Lyndon B. Johnson thought so too. "I think that President Johnson's suspicions in regard to Castro's role were amply justified," he writes. (115-116)  Haig, who had acted as a kind of Army liaison to veterans of the Central Intelligence Agency-led Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, says he was given a report that supported the accusation against Castro, but that he was ordered to forget it and that the report was destroyed.  

The book cost me one cent plus shipping and handling, so I am not complaining.

My CNAS colleague Connor O'Brien recently wandered over to the W Hotel to see what congressional Republicans have up their sleeves. He wandered back with this report. 

By Connor O'Brien

Best Defense Capitol Hill deputy bureau chief

The other day I went to see what Rep. Buck McKeon, the presumptive next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, might have to say about things will change on his watch.

The California Republican was a bit coy. The theme of his talk at the Foreign Policy Initiative's 2010 Forum was leadership. He quoted Gen. Omar Bradley, saying that, "Leadership is intangible, and therefore no weapon ever designed can replace it." HASC, as he sees it, needs to restore leadership where President Obama and congressional Democrats have failed. This includes setting a timeline for drawing down troops in Afghanistan, losing focus on Iraq, cutting missile defense programs, and mishandling the War on Terror.

Mr. McKeon committed to working in a bipartisan manner and promised that HASC would not wade into partisan "gotcha" oversight, but the verbs he used in describing his agenda were telling, as  he vowed to "expose," "expedite," "challenge," and "focus," among other things. But he made few concrete statements about anything outside of the normal oversight power that is given to any congressional committee, other than calling wartime cuts in defense spending "a red line for me and a red line for all Americans." Mr. McKeon even acknowledged that his committee's ability to call Gen. David Petraeus to testify on Afghanistan could be limited by the executive branch. "Well, we can ask," McKeon said, "But as I said, we only have one commander in chief, and if he commands Gen. Petraeus to be busy doing something else, he may not show up."

Leadership is intangible, but the final outcome of defense policy is not. Republicans are no doubt committed to strengthening national defense through expanding the budget, exposing poor practices in the defense bureaucracy, and making a long-term military commitment in Afghanistan, but his committee's ability to change the status quo remains to be seen. The same was true of the 110th Congress, where a Democratic majority elected on an anti-war platform ultimately failed to end the Iraq War. With a Democratic Senate and, if necessary, a presidential veto standing in the way, Mr. McKeon and House Republicans have their work cut out for themselves. Still unresolved is the stance newly elected deficit-hawk Republicans will take on defense spending, a divide Sen. John McCain predicted earlier in the day at the FPI hoedown.

Bottom line: Don't expect too much out of the HASC in the next two years.

By Rebecca Frankel
Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

President Barack Obama flies off on his big trip to Asia this week, and traveling with him, among others, will be 30 bomb-sniffing military dogs.

Working security detail for the president has its perks -- these dogs will be traveling in style, staying in 5-star hotels where they can receive the kind of proper care they need, including special diet food sent ahead from home and a temperature-regulated environment to help the dogs adjust to a new climate.

Some of these reports of the dog detail traveling with the president -- like others alleging that the cost of Obama's trip is a $200 million per day expense -- seem a little sketchy.

But according to an English-language website based in India, a source inside the Mumbai travel agency arranging transportation for Obama's service detail told reporters that the preparations for Obama's sniffing dogs have been in the works for months when prior to the trip, the U.S. consulate "asked for more than 10 customised cars for dogs during the president's visit" to apparently "move with the president's convoy. …"

The cars, apparently, had to be specially outfitted: "For the comfort of the dogs, the back seats in the cars were removed and the interiors were refurbished to ensure they [sic] were no sharp edges." The source added, "Never before, have we seen such VIP treatment for animals."

It seems the arrival of one U.S. military dog in Obama's bomb-sniffing troop to India -- allegedly named "Khan" -- is already causing something of a media storm.

When I was reporting in Iraq, the Washington Post's bureau chief had a list of emergency numbers printed up and put on a laminated card you could keep in your wallet. Like who to call if you are kidnapped.

If I had the power I'd print up this comment by Fred Reed, the Hunter S. Thompson of the right, laminate it, and give one card to every member of the Pentagon press corps:

Reporters don't meet Important People because we news weasels are meritorious, but because the press enjoys power all out of proportion to its worth. If people knew reporters as well as I do, they would emigrate. You could take a blind cocker spaniel with a low IQ and give him, her, or it a press card from the Washington Post, and in three weeks every pol in the city would kiss up to the beast, who would develop delusions of grandeur.

It's the reporter's disease: You come to believe that the Secretary of the Air Force wants a press breakfast with you because he respects the depth of your thought. No. He thinks you are an idiot, and in all likelihood loathes you, but he knows that what you write will show up in the White House clips."

I just want to note that one of my dogs already has delusions of grandeur, and she doesn't even have a press card.

Here my CNAS colleague Kristin Lord, who knows more about public diplomacy than I ever will, points out something that hasn't been noticed about the Obama administration's new National Security Strategy document.

By Kristin Lord
Best Defense bureau chief, public diplomacy operations

The Obama Administration wants you to help implement its new National Security Strategy.

That is a little-noted but forceful undercurrent of the new strategy, which calls for the United States to "take advantage of the unparalleled connections that America's Government, private sector and citizens have around the globe." These connections, the document observes, will not only help America to address specific challenges such as cyber security and pandemic disease, they are a powerful and "cost-effective way of projecting a positive vision of American leadership." "Time and again," the national security strategy observes, "we have seen that the best ambassadors for American values and interests are the American people -- our businesses, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, athletes, artists, military service members, and students." Indeed, the National Security Strategy calls explicitly for engagement with the private sector and civil society no fewer than 27 separate times and devotes five complete paragraphs to the topic.

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My CNAS colleague Patrick Cronin sat in yesterday on Pentagon strategist Amanda Dory's conversation with some bloggers. Here is his report.

By Patrick M. Cronin
Director, Best Defense office of plans and strategy

We live in a dangerous world. That was certainly the conviction of President W. Bush after September 11, 2001. And it would appear to be the major presumption of President Barack Obama. According to Amanda Dory, deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, who yesterday reached out to the blogosphere via teleconference, the White House's recently released National Security Strategy hammers home the threat posed by transnational terrorism but also places greater emphasis on linkages with the weapons of mass destruction. Issues such as the danger posed by fissile materials that are not locked down and the risk posed by biological weapons are highlighted in the new document. Hence, terrorism remains a focal point of American security, albeit now fitting into a wider and more complex security panorama.
Among possible differences between the rhetoric of the National Security Strategy and the reality of national security and defense policy, five points might be offered:

• The National Security Strategy, echoing the QDR, underscores the critical importance of overseas engagement with allies and partners, as well as regional and international institutions that over time become far more capable than they are today. Yet making traditional alliances like NATO or the U.S.-Japan alliance more effective and durable may well be more challenging than supposed. There is also a problem of sheer time management, because traditional alliances have a welter of consultative machinery that requires a good deal of care and attention.
• A second cluster of issues concerns U.S. relations with partners and erstwhile adversaries. Iran's recent diplomatic gambit over nuclear fuel and North Korea's recent use of force at once demonstrate just how difficult it is to implement the sensible precepts of the National Security Strategy. Another issue in both documents arises from the largely unspoken tension between growing partnerships with major powers like China and Russia, from whom threats could emerge in new domains, especially cyberspace and space. Clearly a public strategy document is not the place to harp on such complexities, but reconciling these dueling aspects of relations with the same countries is likely to bedevil putting the words into action.
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Here is a great insight into the way Washington really works, from my CNAS colleague Richard Fontaine.

By Richard Fontaine
Best Defense political officer

Obama's new NSS has a lot in common with its predecessors, and I don't mean just on substance but also on process and presentation. That's because the name is somewhat of a misnomer: the National Security Strategy isn't really a strategy -- in every administration it's more like a really long speech. It doesn't try to match ends to resources or anything of the sort. It won't say that we want to partner with the Iraqis after our drawdown (which is in the document) so we will need X amount of money and Y personnel for Z years and we'll do it this way (which is not). That's not the way it goes.

The way these things work is that you don't lay out some big vision that the government then sticks to. What you do is look at what you've been doing already, try to discern the principles behind your actions, and then package them as the product of overarching strategic thought. You tell yourself that what you are actually doing is bringing into high relief the principles and thinking that implicitly underlay policy thus far. That's actually sort of right, but it doesn't mark a new course -- it's a distillation of what you already believe and are doing.

Then you throw in something for everyone. You try to touch on every conceivable priority so the administration can't get punched for having overlooked a "key" national security issue. You like terrorism? We got terrorism in here! You like loose nukes? Got that too. Minerals? Climate change? Disease? Ditto. You like cold weather? This recognizes that we are an Arctic nation!

Then you spin it as completely, utterly different from your predecessor, even though the vast majority of it is exactly the same -- we have the same old interests and values and mostly use the same old tools in pursuit of them. You play up the differences on the margin and package it in rhetoric that basically says "Our long international nightmare of the ignoramuses in the last administration is over; with our clarity of strategic thought we will be much more competent." The media usually falls for it -- it's about preemption! They want forcible Iraq-style regime change everywhere! It's NOT about preemption! They DON'T want forcible Iraq-style regime change anywhere!

Then you use it almost exclusively externally. Policymakers will rely on guidance provided by PC and DC papers that have actual agreed-upon policies and actions, but not on a NSS-style document. It's not like the Secretary of State or a desk officer or an NSC director will say, "Ah, this issue just came up. I know how to deal with it now because there is a paragraph in the NSS that tells me what to do." The only reason you would conceivably cite the NSS as a policymaker is if you are arguing that your preferred course is right and someone else's is wrong -- "See, paragraph 3 on page 17 says that our nation is committed to do exactly what I am advocating; yours isn't in there, so I am right and you are contradicting the President's policy."

So is it all a wasted exercise? Surprisingly, no -- but you have to recognize the limitations.

It'd be nice to set at least a few priorities, as a signal to the world America will fight (metaphorically speaking) for them. The new administration's NSS should, but doesn't. (Of course you can also envision the conversation behind closed doors -- Official 1: "I think we should say that our relations with Europe, India, Japan and China are our most important." Official 2: "What? That means they are more important than Canada! They'll be insulted! More important than Paraguay? That will needlessly antagonize them. Andorra? It's shooting ourselves in the foot. We can't set priorities without alienating all the non-priority countries and all the people who care about issues we don't think are really, really important. What if this very conversation gets leaked to the press?!")

The National Security Strategy can also be a valuable exercise to provoke a public debate among the foreign policy community. The significant portions of the new NSS that link our domestic situation to America's power abroad is new, and hopefully that will at least generate an external discussion, in the government, on Capitol Hill, and externally -- not just of the costs of our overseas engagement but about the sustainability of our domestic policies.

In the end, it may be that this is one governmental exercise where the process matters more than the product. In order to produce a National Security Strategy, smart people think for a long time about the grand sweep of U.S. policy. Senior policymakers, to the extent they play a role in the process, are forced to think through core issues and future possibilities in a way that is much different from their day to day grind. And all that process can provoke our foreign policy leadership to think more deeply, more broadly, and more about the future than they otherwise would -- and that can't be a bad thing. Maybe Eisenhower said it best: "Plans are worthless but planning is everything." 

By Rebecca Frankel
Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

No one should be surprised to see more bomb-sniffing dogs on the streets of Manhattan this week after the botched Time Square bombing attempt. In the last few months there have a been a number of bomb-related incidents worldwide that have put these dogs on high alert.

Above, a NYC police officer and his dog, Buster, survey the subway station on the corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in Times Square on May 3.

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The front-line blogger is handcuffed upon returning home from Asia. Clearly his captors have never read O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief.

His report:

Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not "arrested", but they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I was polite, but simply refused questions that had nothing to do with national security. Port authority police eve...eventually came -- they were professionals -- and rescued me from the border bullies.

When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No county has treated me with the disrespect can that can be expected from our border bullies.

Reminds me of the time Lady Emma Sky, having labored to revamp the U.S. approach in the Iraq war, was invited to come to Washington to give a speech at a CIA conference on Iraq-and for her pains was pulled into a side room at Kennedy Airport for a little chat.