It’s old, but I’ve been remiss in not linking to it before. Take a look at the proposed Unified Security Budget for the United States, 2007. The point is to try and look at defense spending in the context of a broader pool of security spending and call into question whether it wouldn’t make more sense to shift some emphasis away from the military box and into other ones.

It seems that George W. Bush is going to take Fred Kagan’s advice and send more troops to Iraq. The bad news, as Justin Logan points out is that Kagan’s strategy seems to mostly be based on cooking the books. The good news, however, is that this will probably damage John McCain presidential aspirations in the long term.

Michael Ledeen says the real problem in Iraq is we’re not killing enough people:

Anybody who’s spent time with Iraq veterans has heard complaints about the short leash attached to our military. Every now and then a story surfaces that gives a bit of detail, in which our soldiers mutter that they’re forced to put their lives at even greater risk because they often are forbidden to initiate action.

Ledeen is right, of course, that rules of engagement are crucial. And he’s right, too, that many Iraq vets are upset that the current ROE fail to maximize the safety of US forces. Which is a natural response. If I were being deployed to a war zone, I would want my ROE to maximize my safety, too. On the other hand, if I wanted to bring stability to a foreign country, I would want foreign occupation/peacekeeping troops to act with great restraint in their use of firepower. In practice, one winds up compromising. You get ROE that are far less restrictive than what you’d see for a civilian police force, but still substantialy more restrictive than troops are going to be happy with. So soldiers, not-unreasonably fearing for their lives, break the rules now and again. But it only takes a handful of incidents to completely poison relations (think of the NYPD’s problems with African-American New York then add language and religious barriers, automatic weapons, mortars, and heavily armored vehicles) and you’re in the shitter.

In principle, one could get this balance right and things like the new Counterinsurgency Manual have a lot of operational advice in this regard. The larger point, however, is that you’re putting troops in an intrinsically difficult situation. If you send 130,000 people someplace dangerous for years, incidents where someone errs on the side of personal safety and winds up killing local civilians in a way that doesn’t seem justifiable to the local community are all-but-inevitable. They’re also lethal to the mission.

Another new strategy:

Under the plan developed by Chiarelli’s staff, the military would shift about half of its 15 combat brigades away from battling insurgents and sectarian violence and into training Iraqi security forces as soon as the spring of 2007, military and defense officials said. In northern and western Iraq, U.S. commanders are already moving troops out of combat missions to place them as advisers with lower-level Iraqi army units, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the military in Iraq, said yesterday at a briefing in Baghdad.

I wonder what this even means. It doesn’t seem to me that our typical rank-and-file soldiers are especially trained or qualified to act as trainers of Iraqi security forces. They don’t for example, speak Arabic, and I would imagine that being embedded with a group of heavily armed men whose language you can’t speak would be sort of unpleasant.

But more to the point, what’s the problem that additional training is supposed to address? Hearing proposals like these you would believe that there are two sides in Iraq, the Good Guys and the Bad Guys and that the main problem is that the Bad Guys have a top-notch military academy at their disposal whereas the Good Guys do not. But that’s not the situation at all. Various armed groups seem to be able to fight reasonably effectively without the benefit of American training. At the same time, giving the Iraqi Army more intensive drill-instruction isn’t going to change the basic lack of legitimate national institutions for people to be loyal to.

From Jonathan Edelstein. The Council on Foreign Relations released this briefing sheet this morning.