A Very Worthwhile Cause

Project Valour-IT is an effort to provide voice-activated laptops to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines who have suffered injuries making it difficult or impossible for them to use a standard keyboard. The annual fundraising drive in now underway–please consider contributing.

It’s often been said that the test of a society is how well it treats its children. Another important test, though, is how well it treats people who have fought and suffered on its behalf.

Rudyard Kipling wrote one of his lesser-known poems on this subject. You are no doubt familiar with Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade–well, here is The Last of the Light Brigade.

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Military Justice and the War

Interesting article. NPR tries to spin it against the Bush administration, but it seems to me that the controversy reflects more the politicization of and conflicting goals being pursued by today’s JAG corps. On the one hand the govt biases the Haditha trial in favor of the prosecution. On the other hand (the only side of the issue NPR notices) there are complaints about detainees in Guantanamo — men who could have been summarily executed without legal controversy when they were caught on the battlefield — who are being prosecuted based on confessions extracted by means that would be unacceptable under domestic law.

The controversy over Guantanamo confessions is really the smallest part of a much larger issue, which NPR ignores and whose resolution is not yet clear, about how we should treat hostile war detainees who don’t fit old legal categories such as POW or civilian internee. The anti-war Left pretends that the only question is whether Bush plays by the rules. But the more important question is how to modernize rules which don’t fit current reality and which make it harder for us to fight. The question of how to modernize these rules, if not resolved, will dog any coming Democratic administration as much as it does the current Republican one. Pretending that Bush is the problem only delays the inevitable reckoning.

It seems that the JAG community lags the rest of our military in addressing these issues.

A Great Find

Blogfriend Eddie (who credited Abu Muqawama) sent in a link to a Mother Jones issue that has a veritable roundtable of experts commenting on withdrawing from Iraq. I was very impressed with their selection; below are a few links to some of the experts who would be of the most interest to the readers here:

Colonel T.X. Hammes
Colonel H.R. McMaster
Lt. Colonel John Nagl
Dr. Andrew Bacevich
Dr. Bary Posen
Dr. John Pike
General Anthony Zinni
Dr. Anthony Cordesman
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski

Give it a look.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

Kilcullen on TV

Kilcullen, the Australian adviser to Col. Petraeus, has been mentioned several times here. His television appearances lately include an interview with Charlie Rose and a panel discussion with Ali Allawi (former Iraqi Minister of Defense and author of “The Occupation of Iraq”), Jon Lee Anderson (“The Fall of Baghdad”), Phebe Marr (“The Modern History of Iraq”), and George Packer (“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq”) at the New Yorker Festival. Played twice this weekend on C-Span, it will be repeated tomorrow morning at 6:00 EST. Packer’s profile of Kilcullen demonstrates the New Yorker‘s encouragement of a certain interesting style and its willingness to give a writer space. Earlier references from the extraordinarily knowledgeable Zenpundit: Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part I.) and Colonel Kilcullen, the “Surge” and The Guardian

On War, Comprehension and Persuasion

There must be something in the water lately as I have been getting an upsurge of inquiries and public comments regarding information operations, public diplomacy, “soft power” agents of influence, 5GW and similar matters. There are other blogs I can recommend as being better on this score – Beacon, MountainRunner, Kent’s Imperative, Swedish Meatballs Confidential and Whirledview to name but a few. Also, I would suggest that interested readers search the archives of Studies in Intelligence, PARAMETERS, The Strategic Studies Institute, Combined Arms Research Library and the threads at The Small Wars Council. Genuine expertise may be found there and for discussions of theory and emerging trends, I recommend Dreaming 5GW.

That being said, I will offer my two cents anyway.

One point of agreement across the political spectrum and that of informed opinion is that the USG has not done a particularly good job of managing “the war of ideas” in the conflict with Islamist terrorism. Or against state adversaries. Or with persuading neutrals and even our own allies to our point of view. When you are having difficulty drawing even in global popularity contest with a crowd of bearded fanatics who put beheading videos on the internet, it’s time to admit there’s a problem.

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