Never, ever, dial up Triumph videos at work. People tend to stare at laughing crying idiots rolling on the floor.

"These notes I get from military officers demanding clarity of goals and stated strategic purposes puzzle me."

It used to be called the Weinberger Doctrine, remember? But remember two other things about the concept. One is that it's context when first presented in a Weinberger speech was primarily a response to Administration infighting between SecDef and Secretary of State Schultz - it was not lofty doctrine but rather the Thursday edition of a running gunfight between these two people and these two institutions. At the time it was just another political story (& BTW, never policy qua policy).

The second thing to remember is that Colin Powell was Weinberger's Military Assistant at the time. Since then Powell has reclaimed the doctrine as his own, now so labeled. That's OK - I think he really wrote it for Weinberger.

So it's a speech, not a doctrine, has never been enshrined as expressed policy, but has become the Army's answer to any call to arms. Tom, I think you're right. If you're hearing 'hell no we won't go' in this, you've correctly nailed it as a cop-out for generals.

And it expresses imperialism. If our nation's vital interests correctly identified are at stake, we fight. No doctrine, fight. But when it's in this George Bushian realm of world domination and imperialistic designs on the nationhood of folks he didn't like ('he tried to kill my daddy!'), it comes into play not as doctrine and strategy but rather as part of the checklist before we start the next war of choice. Our army is an instrument of state. But when the state starts on the path of military meddling, the army becomes an instrument of the Administration and not of the nation. Perhaps this is the very best reason for a draft: no war army of conscripts falling in upon a professional cadre can ever be merely a tool of the Presidency; it takes the nation to allow it and back it.

We've sure got a lot of silliness to sort out in the years ahead.

We need infomercials, ala Sally Strothers, requesting monies for the rebels, no, no, Legitimate Libyan Provisional Government.

Here's a sample pitch:

"So often we take our democratic lifestyle for granted, but in other parts of the world people are struggling on 25% political representation or less. For less than $10 a day you can support a Libyan Freedom Fighter. Think about it, that's less than an entree at TGIF or Applebees or 3 domestic beers and a tip at a strip mall bar.

With you pledge of $500 you'll receive an information packet with a picture of your Libyan Freedom Fighter, a short biography, and a list of his positions on social and geopolitical issues."

No wait, scratch that, giving money to some of the Libyans might run one afoul of the Justice Department for aiding and abetting terrorists. Oh what is a liberal internationalist to do? I know. I'll start a facebook solidarity club and try to get all my friends from Free Darfur to join.

So the nation must intervene, military people must face danger and the tax-payers must go further into debt in order to avoid a stain on Obama's reputation? If he was making promises that he couldn't fulfill without acting to the detriment of his constituents then he deserves the shame.

And shirking from what? Not everybody subscribes to recently invented international imperatives.

well, hate to say it, but the final end game (if things go bad) is probably "we cut our losses, sorry we did what we could for ya..." or "not sure, go ask the French and Brits, this is their mission..." which in both cases it might be better to be "unclear" about that and not actually say it out-loud...

I find it puzzling that you believe war is based on uncertainty and ambiguity. Actually, I just find it silly. It's a ridiculous cover for your own confusion and lack of clarity. For all I've read, you're still poking around for a reason to go in. Only now that we're pulling out can you say "what we did was good." But you never really had any definitive recommended course of action to begin with or justification for it. You don't score points for marking the correct answer after the teacher has graded your paper.

You're still going on about how you're right without considering that you're essentially committing the same egregious errors of ommission that you blame the leaders at Wanat for. I know you've been to Iraq and had some close calls, but lately you sound like you've been spending a little too much time in the luxuries of a think tank. Is every mission being flown over there essential and decisive toward achieving the ultimate political objective? Or are we just flying around looking for things to bomb, all video game style? It started as a no-fly zone. Now we're zapping troop carriers. The mercs were supposed to wither away within days of our shock and awe hitting them. Now it's going to take "some weeks." No one was going to put any ground troops in whatsoever. Now the Brits and rebels are talking about limited SOF assets providing assistance.

So I don't really blame you for what you've written here. If world leaders can make it up as they go along, why can't you?

I got out as a Captain but I still agree with your "grumbling Colonels." Probably because I've seen the extra costs incurred by not coming up with a good plan. You don't have to write an 11-page thesis full of doctrinal terms. 250 words on what the hell we're doing and what things I have to accomplish so I can get out of here and go home will suffice. We killing Qaddafi? Partitioning the country? Keeping a no-fly zone or conducting strikes in direct support of rebel columns? Who's the enemy? Are the 'friendlies' actually friendly?

You might not be wrong, but you're more than spitting distance from right. The truth is that you don't know. But as the man once said, if you don't know what you're talking about, keep talking until you figure it out.

I have never read anything about the FDR or Churchill being confused about if it was OK for Hitler to still be in power in Germany at the end of WWII.

I am not even convinced that operation Torch (instead of say Sicily in 1942) was a strategic level decision and not a operational decision. I know the Pols and Combined Chiefs made the decision, that does not make it strategy. "If we stay off the continent we may not get our butts kicked in the first battle" that is a good idea but hardly strategy. Torch worked well with Churchill's way of business "pinpricks around the periphery and no decisive effort". Churchill after being a key architect of Gallipoli and who led a Bn on the Western Front (after being fired as First Lord) had an aversion to decisive operations.

The Allies had a lot of various side excursions, Bomber Command and 8th Air Force said they were going to win the war. The political goals and endstate were clear.

The STRATEGY had been developed by Albert C. Wedemeyer when he was working for Marshall. Wedemeyer had been educated at the Kriegsakademie so the strategy was to make entry into the Continent of Europe and carry the war into the German heartland (Simple like Karl said).

If you don't know where you're going you can get there by almost any route.

Just to get this straight, for a war (because this is a war, however small) you didn't believe in with Iraq, senior officers were morally remiss for not questioning the clear lack of an end state and poor planning, but for this "morally" justified war officers are "shirking" their duty by asking for clarity.

I usually think you are pretty sharp, but I think you are way off on this.

"If President Obama had not intervened in Libya a week ago, we would indeed probably now be looking at Benghazi as his Srebrenica -- except that his Cairo speech would have given him an additional load of responsibility, of seeming to bear false promises."

This lead reveals precisely what is and has long been wrong with American foreign policy.

It's not about Presidents. Who they are. What they say.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan moronically quipped that Marines in Beirut were there as "peacekeepeers" and, later, were there to "support the legimate government of Lebanon."

Both of these ad libs were substantively incorrect, but U.S. policy instantly shifted to them in order to prevent Reagan from looking like an ass.

The end result was =not= the deaths of 241 American servicemen in the October 23, 1983, bombing. Not even close. It has stretched through three land wars and assorted chaos to the bombing of Libya this week. And it will continue to bear poison fruit as long as Muslims remember that the U.S. Marines were sent in 1983 to support Christian oligarchs in Lebanon--because Ronald Reagan said so. Stupidly. Incorrectly. Stubbornly. Unquestioned. And unjudged (except by me).

Do our sons and daughters have to pay in blood for what the next U.S. President in a row has said aloud in a moment of utter stupidity?

What we see playing out in front of experts who have become utterly inurred to irresponsibility from our leaders is American hubris.

The issue of Srebrinca is and was Europe's responsibility. The same goes for Libya, if England and France wanted to go into an ambiguous conflict zone and be dragged into a quagmire in their own backyard with their own national interests at stake, then fine. But asking questions by American military leaders is a MUST.

Also the parallel is faulty, the massacre of Srebrinca was due to UN forces already on the ground withdrawing and letting the Serbs murder the Bosnians.

Yes, war is uncertain. However, one shouldn't compound that inherent uncertainty with vague policy goals, a coalition that can't agree on what the policy should be, much less the desired end-state, and using the military instrument of national power for a task it isn't very good at: "protecting civilians" through the use of air power with no land forces at all. This takes uncertainty to new levels and should not be defended by suggesting that people may be shirking their duty in pointing it out.

Geez Tom, the dust isn't even settled yet and you're already positing counterfactuals that can't be disproven. As for the other justifications, what's the difference between say Libya and Bahrain? If we fail to intervene there, does Obama also lose face? Does the U.S.? Where does that line of justification end?

Tom,

The complaining colonels are in good company:

"No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

-Clausewitz, On War

Is a clear and unambigous explanation of this military action in the form of a speech by the president to the American people. It is stunning to me that the president has resisted giving such a speech. Going back to Carter and Desert One, through Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II, presidents have spoken directly to nation to explain their actions. If I recall, Clinton even did this for Desert Fox, a pipskeak of an airwar compared to Libya.

Until the president makes his case to the people, we are stuck floundering around trying to divine his intention from the many seemingly contradictary statements made by both the president and his cabinet officers.

My suspicion is that he is avoiding exactly such a clear statement in order to keep his options open as events unfold. Good politics, bad leadership... and pretty much par for this administration.

The longer the president holds off on clearly explaining himself, the harder it is for the nation to support his actions... and the louder the chorus of opposition grows.

First, because the nature of life is ambiguity and uncertainty. War is just a little bit more stressful than most of life. That is enough to make decisions as to whether to go to war things to be approached with caution, and with clear ideas of what one wants to achieve. Those ideas may not be complete, but they can't be based only on scenarios in which everything goes right. The Obama administration is way over that line with respect to its actions in Libya.

Second, because Tom Ricks wrote "Fiasco." He documented, in an entire book, how hopeful assumptions and wishful thinking doomed the American commitment in Iraq right from the start, or even before. Throughout the period covered by the book, Bush administration officials offered up "ambiguity and uncertainty" defenses -- the existence of "unknown unknown" as an explanation for the phantom WMDs, "going to war with the army you have" in response to complaints about military vehicles unable to withstand roadside bombs. In "Fiasco," as I recall, Ricks treated this approach with contempt. About Libya, he embraces it.

He embraces as well the assumption of the worst case without American intervention. Personally, I well believe a victorious Qadhafi would inflict on his enemies retribution comparable to what Saddam Hussein got so good at. But many of them have means of escape -- something that was not true of the Muslims seized and murdered in Bosnia because they were Muslims, or the ethnic Africans slaughtered in their thousands in Darfur because they were not Arab. The Obama administration has declared that preventing Qadhafi's revenge is worth American bombs and missiles, but not risks to the lives of American soldiers on the ground. Obama is showing his moral commitment, but is not going nuts. What sounds like tough-minded realism to Tom Ricks sounds completely nuts to me, among other reasons because it doesn't even prevent the worst case he is so worried about. It just prevents it from happening now, to the side we're supporting. I wonder if Tom Ricks has ever thought about what will happen to Qadhafi's supporters if the rebels win.

Third -- and this part is not really that weird, because nearly everybody does it -- Ricks is for Arab democracy, but does not accept Arab agency. Obama, like Bush, has swallowed whole the utterly fatuous, intellectually adolescent fantasy that Arab governments are repressive and occasionally murderous because America and the West have "propped them up" in the name of stability. All we need to do is "get on the right side of history," support the Arab democrats, and voila'! No more Middle Eastern problems.

Obama would recoil, as Bush did, from the assumption that Arab government reflects Arab political culture, and that Arab political culture has a deep strain of savagery and barbarism. Whether it is unique in the world in that respect is irrelevant. What matters are the implications for American policy. If Arab government is not a product of Arab political culture but the result of American policy, we are responsible for what a government like Qadhafi's does (again, not so responsible that we're willing to get closer than 30,000 feet to the action, but still). The Libyan rebels are our problem.

I understand where Obama's impulses lead him, but don't get at all why this appeals to Tom Ricks. Obama is more thoughtful than Bush, more collegial, more accommodating to allies -- and has made America a party to civil war in a third Muslim country, with no remotely realistic objective beyond preventing something one side might do to the other and no plan to address what happens if something goes wrong. This makes Obama -- what? A more attractive, better-mannered screw-up?

I'll leave to another time the discussion of whether Obama's attacking another country with approval from the Arab League but not the approval of Congress is proper. I'm not sure yet another area of ambiguity and uncertainty is something Tom Ricks can handle right now.

Tom,

I agree that it's ridiculous for military leaders to whine about not having clarity in military planning goals, but I suspect the whining reaching a high pitch because they weren't getting even a vague guess as to what to plan for.

The whole Joint Planning Process and Military Decision Making Process, whether you like it or not, still is the way the majority of our military forces try to plan for something like this. And the lead-in phase of "Mission Analysis" gets much easier if you have something from the top to frame your planning around.

You've probably seen or heard of Joint planning efforts that churn on endlessly in Mission Analysis, and that's sometimes because a leader isn't receiving guidance and is unwilling to take the chance of choosing the notional end-state or strategic objective that really should be coming from higher authority.

Maybe there was a clear national interest being communicated internally to help drive the planning process, but maybe the whining you heard was an attempt by military staffers to try to avoid an endless Mission Analysis whirlpool by communicating the need for better articulated national interest.

There will always be people who complain about not having been given enough information to make a decision. If there's enough of them complaining like that, it might be that someone is failing to provide that information, who should.

They are "grumbling" because they are Republicans. Do you really think they would be grumbling if simplistic Bush said that we are going in to transform Libya into a democracy? What end state would they have demanded in Rwanda or Darfur?

What would a colonel say if a private asked him/her the same question after receiving and op order? These guys wouldn't know what to do with an end state if it was written in braille.

General Ham just said it all. He said he wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that he had let all those civilians be slaughtered. That would have been the "end state" if we hadn't gone in. This is not a war, this is military action short of war.

If these "colonels" want a time limit, I'm sure that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks could give them a date using the same methodology they used for planning the Iraq War.

Hey colonel, here's an end state, the same one you use for the private, "Shut up and do what you are told."

It strikes me as unfair to criticize military officers for questioning our policy in Libya -- and it is a little patronizing to call it grumbling. There does not appear to be any footdragging on the part of the military to do what it has been ordered to do -- and in fact, has responded remarkably given other commitments.

Compare that to the reaction of the services in the Kosovo intervention where some senior officers arguably DID slowroll President Clinton, and tried to endrun the policy.

You said the task was "preventing a slaughter". Fair enough. But what you are doing is simply delaying it -- and really just ensuring that different people are killed. In the end, a bunch of people are going to be dead, and it is not clear what has been resolved.

It isn't a bar room fight where if you can just separate the brawlers, cooler heads will prevail.

There are protesters getting killed in Syria. How many Iranian "civilian" activists have been garrotted in the dark since their green movement?

The Presiden chose to act on Libya -- but it is a half-measure that balanced an increasingly one-side conflict without necessarily ensuring the preferred side will win, or providing a mechanism to separate the belligerents in a way that would actually stop the killing.

If that is not confusion of war aims, I am not sure what is. And the uncoordinated, strange comments by GEN Ham, ostensibly the combatant commander raise plenty of questions that need to be addressed by someone.

Gaddafi has two choices it would appear to me, fight on or seek a negotiated settlement allowing him and his family free passage and freedom from prosecution. The latter choice at this time seems unlikely but who can say? Therefore Gaddafi’s best and most likely option seems to be to soldier on.

Air power can be a tiebreaker but only if it is coordinated with boots on the ground. It is a skill that cannot be quickly improvised by rag tag insurgents. It is interesting in the ME how there are ‘good’ insurgents and ‘bad’ insurgents, who look, act, speak, and smell all the same. How do we tell the apart? However, the US, France and Britain have at least in public taken a ground force off the table. Whether these statements are deliberate misinformation or in fact policy remains to be seen.

Obama has already spilled the milk and we are not going to get it back into the bottle. So what to do now that the three key members of this coalition have neatly painted themselves into the corner with a self imposed limit on military force?

Those of us who opposed the intervention from the beginning because of small things like a missing strategic rational, the lack of a debate and an AWOL Congress have clearly lost that part of the argument. As a matter of fact we are getting rather used to losing arguments about war making over the past decade. Anyway, after dipping our toe once again into the water do we turn about and run away from the shark in the sea or do we drop a depth charge right on his snout?

Personally, I would rather leave the beach than suffer another screwed up half-assed effort that ends up bloodily inconclusive and enhances the reputation of the nut case in the bunker. If on the other hand we are going to do it irrespective of common sense then unleash the dogs of war and get the damn thing over with.

OK, I'll take one more shot at explaining this in somewhat simplified terms. Let's take an operational task as an example.

Say I am Major Schmuckatelly and have been directed by COL Halftrack to write a FRAGO that will order an operation to tackle corruption in the Greenland National Army, whom we are attempting to mentor to assume sole responsibility for the security of their nation. COL Halftrack simply said, "Major S, write up a FRAGO that will help eliminate corruption in the GNA." That's it, that's all he said.

As a good FGO I decide to ask for a little clarification. "Colonel, could I ask a few questions?"

"Why certainly Major."

"At what level would you like to attack the corruption? Corps? Division? Battalion? Company? Where would you like to attack corruption? In SE Greenland? The Southwest? The North? All of Greenland? What unit should I assign this task to? The 82nd? TF Rock? The Anti-Corruption Task Force in the Green Zone? What timeframe shall we give them to start reporting on what milestones have been achieved? A six month review? Quarterly? Annual? What criteria would be suitable to measure effectiveness of the operation?"

"Major," replies the Colonel crossly, "You are intelligent enough to figure all those things out yourself. Suck it up and stop whining."

Fair enough. So I develop a plan to tackle corruption at the corps level and assign a 3-star command with the responsibility for administering the plan. The next day the General calls me into his office after reviewing the draft FRAGO and chews my butt out for not doing what he wanted at all. Turns out he wanted to tackle corruption at the tactical (company and below) level and wanted PRTs to do the work.

Now let's go to the strategic level of developing an OPLAN. If the Colonels are given very little guidance, don't they have a responsibility to ask leadership for more informationto increase the likelihood of the success of the operation? It's not whining to seek guidance, it's a responsibility of both the planners and leadership to provide as much fidelity and detail to the plan as possible. Communication, feedback, and the conveyance of expectations are critical to organizational success. It's not needless doctrine, it's required leadership and followership. If you fail to give your subordinates good guidance, then don't be surprised when they fail to deliver what you had in mind all along. This isn't even just a military problem. The business world is full of examples of failed product lines and services caused by management not articulating proper guidance to subordinates.

I guess since I live with this every day it's seems so obvious. Not sure how else I can convey just how vital good guidance and direction from leadership is to a successful operation. We can't even agree between NATO and the US who has C2 or what the objective of all this is. Any good that has been done in the past week is at high risk to be squandered if this is not resolved. If I am whining when I question this, well then so be it, I am a world class whiner.

I think we pull up our socks and start moving forward.

We don't need a Casus Belli everyday. We sure don't need a Different Casus Belli everyday (somebody already used 1984 East Asia analogy the other day that was, Double Plus Good sung by Annie Lennox).

It is not too late for the President to pull up HIS socks and decide what the national goal is. He needs to keep in mind the Genocide Memsahibs are never going to be happy. If we actually start hurting the COL they are going to decide THAT is genocide. If the Rebels actually prevail there is likely to be chaos and score settling THAT will be genocide. We probably are not going to be able to turn around and start bombing the rebels, and don't WANT to have enough boots on the ground to make things happen or stop things from happen (just in case your wondering if Libya has 6.8M people, one peacekeeper for 50 in pop would be 136,000). We don't want to be in stabilization business that means the endstate is STILL likely to be ugly.

I'd suggest that Getting COL, his family, henchmen out of power is a clearly identifiable goal. Even if there is NO GENOCIDE, if the war goes on forever a lot more people will die in a battle of attrition than would have died in Benghazi. Mr. President put on that CDR IN CHIEF hat, tell us what you want us to accomplish.