Experts have mixed opinions on the resignation of Gen. (ret.) Stanley McChrystal in June, as military policies and ethics come to the forefront of the debate.
“Obama should pocket McChrystal’s supposed resignation and tell him to get back to work,” said Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, in an op-ed for NYDailyNews.com shortly after the resignation happened.
Bacevich said McChrystal has a history of “egregious lack of judgment” in his views and public statements. For example, McChrystal insisted he needed more troops to achieve success in Afghanistan. He requested 40,000 troops and was granted 30,000.
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Charles D. Allen, professor of cultural science at the Army War College, said McChrystal should have known how to strike Al – I do not understand what you are adding? Allen said being a military commander under civilian authority is a delicate balance. What would he “strike?” the delicate balance of being a military commander under civilian authority.
“By Title 10 law…his support goes to the president and secretary of defense. He knows every word he says is being scrutinized,” said Allen.
Under this premise, McChrystal should never have publicly disagreed with the president’s policies by being so candid to a Rolling Stone reporter. Apparently McChrystal allowed a slack environment in which those under his command were allowed to laugh and make fun of the President and Vice-President Biden on issues they disagreed on. Allen said letting him go was inevitable.
“Over the past years many leading officers said things contrary to the department of defense, so he [McChrystal] knew he was in a very sensitive position,” said Allen, referring to several officers being held accountable for their words by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Most notably, Adm. William Fallon, who was allowed to resign after expressing concern about President Bush’s Iran policy during an Esquire interview in April, 2008.
McChrystal and some of his staff gave disapproving comments about members of the Obama administration to Michael Hastings, a freelance reporter for the Rolling Stone last June. Shortly after, McChrystal resigned and was replaced by Gen. David Petraeus, who was then the head of U.S. Central Command and former commanding general in Iraq.
This was only the second time in recent history that a U.S. commanding general in a war zone was let go. General Douglas MacArthur was the first general in command to be fired for stretching orders in the Korean War. He wrote a letter against President Harry Truman’s war strategies, which he provided to the media and read aloud at the House of Representatives.
Hastings contends he did not have the intention of getting McChrystal fired, but he knew what he was writing may cause a stir. He said he felt obligated to write what was said regardless of the consequences to his relationship with the military.
“I think the journalists are an asset [to the military],” said Allen. “The press provides us a service as well as an aperture for us to show things to the civilians. The military should be more transparent. It is good for citizens to see what is happening and that is important.”
Some journalists say after the Hastings article, it is more difficult for them to speak with their military contacts for fear of repercussions. Allen said it is likely a phase.
“You have to have a relationship developed over time. The trust was violated somehow. The tension will dissolve [in time], but the relationship will always be there,” said Allen.
Gen. Petraeus said he agrees with the current strategies in Afghanistan and feels the U.S. and NATO are on the right track. He supports Obama’s drawback of troops in July 2011, but is unsure of the number of troops to scale back.
Not everyone shares Petraeus’ optimism.
“The Afghanistan War [is] not worth fighting,” said Bacevich in an email. “Even if it ends in success, however loosely defined, we will have gained little or nothing while paying very heavy costs.”
In December, a comprehensive assessment of the Afghanistan war is due to be released and Obama will decide if the present policies and strategies are effective, or should be changed. Bacevich feels McChrystal should have remained on duty until the report comes out.
“If by December the outlook for Afghanistan remains bleak,” said Bacevich in his op-ed, “a change of command in Kabul will be very much in order – not for insubordination but for incompetence.”
]]>Proponents of maintaining a nuclear arsenal that large, like former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, cite reasons like deterrence, the defense of allies worldwide and the need to keep pace with other nuclear powers like Russia, that continue to modernize their nukes.
But there are also a myriad of groups that advocate nuclear disarmament.
On Oct. 29, a panel of nuclear weapons experts met at the politically progressive Institute of Policy Studies in Washington to discuss the elimination of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The IPS panel was convened to discuss steps the Obama Administration can take on its own to enhance the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and eliminate nuclear weapons without bilateral agreements or backing from Congress.
“About 3,500 to 4,200 [nuclear weapons] have essentially been discarded by the military,” said Alvarez, now an senior nuclear policy scholar at IPS. “They’re not needed. But they’re just sitting around and there’s no interest in taking them apart.
“When you do have intact or semi-intact warheads, it’s not quite like having a stockpile of our conventional artillery shells,” he continued. “It’s like having a very large collection of a zoo of wild animals that you have to watch a lot and spend a lot of money and time maintaining and surveilling.”
The Department of Energy, which manages the U.S. nuclear weapons program, plans to allocate $9 billion dollars per year to upgrade nukes and modernize strategic delivery systems over the next 20 years.
In fact, panelist Marylia Kelley, director of the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment in Livermore, Calif., pointed out that when adjusted for inflation, the U.S. spends almost 30 percent more on nuclear weapons than it did on average during the Cold War, when the perceived need for nuclear deterrence was at its height.
According to Alvarez, a study this year by two military professors determined that an arsenal of just 311 nuclear warheads is sufficient to provide deterrence (Forsyth, Saltzman and Schaub, 2010).
Yet funding for dismantlement of the current oversized arsenal is being cut by almost half over the next five years, while maintenance and life extension operations for the existing nukes will increase to $1.5 billion per year. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration defended the cut in an article published by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, saying it would not prevent the NNSA from meeting prior dismantlement requirements.
Unilateral elimination of nukes by presidential decree, as was done in 1991, was one potential solution discussed by the panel to quell nuclear spending.
After the end of the Cold War, the President George H.W. Bush ignored the Nuclear Weapons Council and made a unilateral decision to drastically reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As a result, an unprecedented 5,000 U.S. nuclear weapons were removed from their stations around the world.
Since then, however, Alvarez believes that the NWC– a joint Department of Defense and DOE organization that makes nuclear policy recommendations to the president — has made a significant effort not to have its advice sidestepped again.
“Because these people care about this one issue, this is what they do and this is where they are in the structure – they are important,” said Zia Mian, a nuclear policy maker and researcher on the International Panel on Fissile Materials at Princeton University. “The public does not care and the political leadership does not care. This is just one more issue for them. And so as a consequence, those who care the most have the most leverage.”
Alvarez said that the greatest challenges going forward for advocates of nuclear disarmament would be getting enough citizens and politicians on board with a large scale disarmament plan and removing the common notion that nukes are necessary because, “they keep us safe.”
“I think that if we had the will to do it, we could certainly remove 90 percent of our weapons for deployment in five years,” Alvarez said, referring to retiring the active nuclear stockpile. “We could probably dismantle all of them in 20.”
Alvarez said it would cost about as much to dismantle the weapons as it does to maintain them — $9 billion per year. But the difference, of course, would be that after a generation spent dismantling, the cost savings would be enormous and come rapidly, rather than having the costs continue to increase annually for maintenance purposes, as they do now.
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The health needs of returning veterans are considerable – increased diagnosis of brain cancer, emphysema, traumatic brain injuries, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Suicide among war fighters has become an often sought story, said Ami Neiberger-Miller, public affairs officer for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. She spoke on a panel about issues facing returning vets during the Military Reporters and Editors Conference in Washington. The Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and the National Institute of Military Justice at American University were co-sponsors.
When Neiberger-Miller started working with an organization for military families who had lost loved ones, she would get about three calls a week from people whose family members committed suicide. Now she deals with closer to 10 families a week.
Neiberger, whose brother was killed in combat in 2007, said families spend the first couple of years after the loss going on their own quest for information.
“People who have completed that process are often the people who can reflect the best on what led their loved one to that point – flaws in the system, symptoms or signs that were missed,” Neiberger-Miller said.
Steve Robinson, vice president for Veterans Affairs within Prudential, and Tim Embree, legislative associate for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, described employment obstacles faced by vets.
Recent unemployment numbers for the general population, while high, have been stable, Embree said, but unemployment among veterans has been getting worse.
“It’s a struggle to make the leap from military to civilian life,” Embree said.
Vets have to learn how to translate the valuable decision-making and leadership skills they learned in the military to the civilian workforce, he said.
Embree, a former Marine Corps reservist, said it is harder to get federal officials and legislators to put veterans on their agendas for employment, health care and education because they make up such a small portion of the constituency.
Robinson, who served in the Army for 20 years, noted that the public’s investment in military issues has also diminished since the 1940s. In World War II, 16 percent of the population was employed in some role that supported the war. It has decreased since then, from 6 percent during the Vietnam War to 3 percent during the Gulf War to less than 1 percent today.
“It’s not on people’s radar,” he said. “[Veterans] are bearing a burden that 99 percent of America doesn’t have to bear.”
]]>WASHINGTON — As more is learned about mental health issues faced by war fighters, it is likely that diminished capacity or insanity defenses could become more common in military trials and military leaders may be found at fault, according to experts speaking at the Military Reporters and Editors conference Friday.
Attorneys will still have to uphold the legal standard for that defense, said retired Cdr. Phil Cave, formerly a deputy director in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s office. For instance, having post traumatic stress disorder is not a good enough reason to plead insanity, Cave said. But sentencing could be more focused on mitigation, on what can be treated and how the person can be rehabilitated, he said.
Michael Navarre, special counsel in the Washington law firm Steptoe and Johnson, also noted that the diminished mental capacity defense is hard to support because people who join the military are presumed to be fit and ready for service.
Retired Lt. Col. Geoffrey Corn, who served as special assistant on law of war matters in the Army Judge Advocate General’s office, said during a discussion later in the conference that pounding on the chain of command is a classic military defense strategy. Because military commanders now have a better understanding on mental health issues, when a service member receives inadequate care and then commits a crime, lawyers are going to look back and ask why something wasn’t done, Corn said.
Panelists speculated on how these issues would weigh on the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan who is accused of killing 13 people in a shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas last year.
Cave said Hasan’s case is unusual because of the extreme nature of the crime and likely will be treated as a capital murder case.
“Based on what I’ve read … he’s got a tough time operating an insanity defense.”
Michelle McCluer, executive director of the National Institute of Military Justice at American University’s Washington College of Law, encouraged reporters to keep an eye on the military commissions held at Guantanamo Bay.
She said someone from her organization tries to attend every military commission held at Guantanamo Bay because it is one of the few allowed to be an official observer. But even with that access, it is difficult to find out when case motions will be heard or commissions held and the logistical parameters of who they can talk to and when are always changing, she said.
“If you want to talk about transparency or the lack thereof, commissions are a great way to start,” she said.
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Watch Video from all Friday sessions
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Returning war vets continue to battle health care and employment systems at home
After facing the challenges of war, returning veterans face hardships dealing with the health care, education and employment systems, veteran advocates said Friday. The health needs of returning veterans are considerable – increased diagnosis of brain cancer, emphysema, traumatic brain injuries, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Read more.
Increased mental health issues likely to affect military law cases, experts say
As more is learned about mental health issues faced by war fighters, it is likely that diminished capacity or insanity defenses could become more common in military trials and military leaders may be found at fault, according to experts speaking at the Military Reporters and Editors conference Friday. Read more.
Woodward to media: Be aggressive with military
Journalists need to be more aggressive when they cover the military and deal with public officials, said acclaimed Washington Post reporter and editor Bob Woodward. “There are too many cases when people in the military get away with saying things that are just not plausible,” Woodward said. Read more.
Growing pains for U.S. CyberCommand
The U.S. Cyber Command will face growing pains as it seeks to define both its mission and limitations in the near future, panelists and a command official said Friday. “There’s so little established law that we can weigh in with our opinions and they might actually matter,” said Col. Gary Brown, staff judge advocate for U.S. Cyber Command. Read more.
Hastings takes on military reporters
Michael Hastings, the reporter whose Rolling Stone article led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal because of quotes from him and his staff disparaging Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other top civilian leaders, defended his ethics in getting the story to a group of military journalists on Thursday night. Read more.