Chicago Boyz

The military historian Anthony Beevor (author of this and this) has a good op-ed in today’s New York Times. Beevor notes that Blair is facing the biggest political challenge of his life with a referendum on the EU Constitution, with 70% of the electorate opposed to it:

The decision over the Constitution is probably the most important Britain has faced since World War II. I will vote against it for several reasons. Most important, a genuinely democratic constitution, like that of the United States, defines the limits of power of the state over the individual. Yet the draft European Constitution is almost entirely about amassing power for a superstate. It is antidemocratic, dangerous and throughly out of date.

Beevor also has strong and sensible criticism of the Brussels regime:

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One nice thing about receiving home delivery of the Boston Globe is that our carrier inserts it into a handy plastic bag which can be used to pick up dog poop. Too often, the packaging is far better than the contents, and the comparison is not much better after I’ve walked the dog. Today the newspaper featured an article on how the authorities at the Democratic convention are grappling with the issue of weblogs as legitimate press. It looks like they will be issuing some press credentials to some bloggers.

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Sure, why not? Everyone dislikes it, but some of the senders and subject lines that get through the filters these days are not unamusing. For instance, I just received a urgent missive from “Ahmad Mcneill.” Maybe I should create a new folder and start saving the best examples.

Stable price levels in the real-money betting markets at Intrade.com and Iowa Electronic Markets suggest that the Abu Ghraib revelations haven’t hurt Bush’s reelection chances, which have been >50% at Iowa and around 60% at Intrade for the past several weeks. These markets aren’t crystal balls, and Bush’s reelection odds aren’t a perfect proxy for public support for the war, but I think the markets are pretty good indicators that the POW-mistreatment scandal isn’t the confidence-shaking earthquake that some of the press and Democrats make it out to be. Glenn Reynolds is absolutely right that public demoralization is the goal here. People should take notice of who benefits politically from it.

UPDATE: As of May 11 the midpoint of the bid/ask spread on Bush’s reelection odds has dropped by a couple of points. I don’t know if this is a significant shift but it suggests some weakening in the Administration’s public standing.

UPDATE 2: EconoPundit compares Intrade’s odds estimates to those derived from conventional opinion-polling.

What is the role of the SecDef? For one, to define a vision for the DOD; a roadmap to the future, a strategic plan. In this, Secretary Rumsfeld has provided the vision of ‘transformation’. In short, it’s a plan to make the armed forces lighter, more quickly and easily deployable, and simultaneously, more lethal. Laudable goals. Hence, we have the cancellation of the Crusader, a behemoth of a self propelled howitzer. Too big, too heavy. We also have the promotion of the Stryker armored vehicle. It fits into the network-centric warfare scheme of the future quite nicely. So far, so good.

Finally, on the ‘vision’ thing, we have the light-mobile force concept. Special forces types, acting with forward air controllers, use combined arms techniques to leverage modern telecom capablities and precision weapons synergistically. They’re ‘force multipliers’, as Rummy likes to say. The war in Afghanistan was a demonstration, if you will, of how light forces can bring precision firepower to bear to create battlefield effects formerly reserved for heavy armored divisions. Again, no quibbles.

That brings us to the SecDef’s other primary duty, the strategy and management of warfare. And that brings us to Iraq.

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