Organizing Entropy

What would a Syrian Intervention Look Like?

Talk of an intervention in Syria is beginning to sound serious and there are a non-trivial number of influential people advocating for an intervention.  The stated purpose would be to protect certain members of the Syrian population from their government - an extension of the R2P doctrine that's popular with liberal interventionists as well as several members of the Obama administration.  But is that goal achievable with a limited use of military force? ("limited" in this context means air power with, at most, minimal SoF presence on the ground to facilitate air-ground coordination) Depending on the context and details, I think the limited use of military force could protect those now being killed, but the downsides are pretty dramatic and, in my judgment, the negatives outweigh the benefits by a large margin.  Let's take a look at the various options:

First of all, I think there are three "categories" in which military force could be used, or could play a role, to prevent these particular mass killings:

1. Regime change, by whatever means.
2. Change the balance of power between Assad’s forces and the opposition so that Assad’s forces cannot conduct mass killings.
3. Compel Assad to have a “change of heart”and make a political decision to stop the mass killings or reconcile with the opposition.

Let’s examine the utility of military force in each case:

First, regime change:

• Regime change is something military force can achieve by following, very roughly, the Libya model. Another model is the post Desert Storm counter-factual where we help the Iraqi Shia rebels by giving them a proxy air force to finish Saddam off after we decimated his conventional forces.   The US does have a lot of experience at this sort of thing - it's exactly what we did for the initial invasion of Afghanistan and it's also what we did for Libya.  From a pure utility standpoint, I think this is achievable.
• The problem is, however, that whatever the circumstances, we can’t control how regime change occurs or turns out in the end. It’s a pretty big gamble and the odds are good that the result will not be pretty.   The stakes are a lot greater in Syria than Libya because Syria is bigger, more populous, better armed, has chemical weapons, is more geographically strategic, and plays an important regional role with it's alliance with Iran and involvement in factional Lebanese politics.  It's not clear at all how things would turn out if we upset that apple cart.
• So the best case here is a successful coup, but that’s not something we can create or control through military force.  It's also not clear that an Alawite successor would view the rebels any differently than Assad. The worst case is a civil war in a highly militarized country rife with internal divisions that also happens to have a lot of chemical weapons.
• Even if Syria transitions smoothly to a new government, the effect will likely be that Syrians will still die, they'll just be different Syrians.   As noted over at Best Defense by a Marine officer: "Killing several thousand Syrians so they don't kill several thousand other Syrians only to leave the nation knowing that several thousand more will die is not protecting anyone."

The second option is to use military force to change the balance of power between Assad and the opposition.  There are two basic ways to do this.

1. First is to create no-fly/no-drive zones, (using the Southern/Northern watch model) or something similar like "humanitarian corridors" which some advocate for.  A bigger version of this the Bosnia partition model which would require an enduring ground-force commitment to separate the warring parties.  Any of these options could be accomplished militarily, but there are some serious downsides.  The most obvious problem is that such measures are inherently temporary.  At some point the NFZ or enforced partition will end.  Perhaps a political solution could be negotiated while the parties are separated, but that is not likely for a whole host of reasons I won't belabor here.  If a political solution isn't reached, and the political will to continue spending resources enforcing the peace ends, then the situation would likely return to the status-quo ante.
2. The second option involves attriting Assad’s military and security forces while strengthening the opposition so that Assad no longer has the capability to conduct the mass killings even if he still has the intent.  This is a task the US military could accomplish, though it would take a long, sustained air campaign.  The problem with this option, however, is what then? Either the situation will slide again into Assad’s favor (a return to the status quo ante), or the opposition will be strong enough to overthrow Assad (see regime change), or you end up with a stalemated civil war. None of these options sound very good to me.  The best that could be hoped for is for an autonomous area for the rebels, similar to what the Kurds have in northern Iraq, but that's easier said than done and comes with yet more issues and downsides.

The third option is to use military force to compel Assad to come to a political solution with the opposition instead of using violence.  This seems the least-realistic of the options and the one least-likely to be accomplished with military force.  Is Assad the kind of man who could be bullied into compliance?  It's possible I suppose, but it would be uncharacteristic for the typical dictator in Assad's circumstances.  And if Libya is any guide, the political mission creep will tend to try to box Assad in and provide no option but fight until the bitter end.  There's also no guarantee that the opposition would accept any offer from Assad, especially since their primary demand is that Assad step down from office. In my judgment, this option is mostly fantasy abetted by wishful thinking.

There is a fourth option which focuses on punishment as the goal.  Although it wouldn't prevent mass killings, it would "send a message."  I'm talking, of course, about the tried and true punitive raid.  For Syria it would have to be pretty big and would likely last a couple of days - look at Operation Desert Fox for an example of what it might look like.  The operation would likely strike regime targets and key strategic facilities. It won’t stop the killings, won’t topple the Assad regime, but at least we could be satisfied that we “did something" even if that "something" is counterproductive.

That's about all I can think of for the use of military force against Syria.  I didn't mention a ground invasion, but that is out of the question and it would not be a "limited" intervention by any stretch of the imagination.  If there are other options I'm missing, please leave them in the comments. 

In summary, I don’t see how any of the “limited” military intervention options would actually achieve the stated goal at an acceptible cost to the US or even the Syrian people.  We could always get lucky, of course, but luck is not a strategy. And I've not even listed some of the more obvious strategic problems with intervention.  Mark Safranski lists some geostratic consequences and I would point out the domestic political difficulty of starting another war during an election year when the public is obviously weary of foreign conflicts.

Iran and Syria, Compare and Contrast

There's a lot of talk this week about Syria and Iran and the various potential actions the US might or might not take against both countries.  What strikes me as more than a bit strange is that many observers and experts argue that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would be a disaster not only for the US, but also for the region, yet consequences are hardly mentioned at all with regard to an attack against Syria with airstrikes for the purpose of regime change.  Actually, only the consequences of inaction in Syria are mentioned, not the consequences of action.  While many pundits make frankly ignorant and ahistorical comparisons about supposed similarities between the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, there is silence on this with respect to Syria.  Why?  Cognitive bias and ideological blindness at work again.

 

After all, Syria, unlike Iran, has an active chemical weapons program and an active arsenal of chemical warheads which could be deployed by aircraft, artillery and ballistic missiles.  Syria has used this arsenal as a hedge against Israel, and this week there were rumors that Syria might use them against the opposition.  What would the regime do with those weapons if it's existence was directly threatened by a Western intervention, even if it's only naval and air power?  What will happen to these weapons if Assad is overthrown?  Can we expect and orderly accounting of these weapons?  No one knows and anyone other than the Assads who believes they know for certain are fools.

 

The proponents of direct military intervention in Syria make a pretty poor effort to cloak the justification as R2P, but of course the reality is that in both cases the goal is regime change.  If anything, the "run-up" to intervention in Syria is the Godchild of the invasion of Iraq, complete with no serious discussion of what would happen once the Alawites fall.  Syria is, like Iraq, a state cobbled together and full of internal factions and age-old animosities that are very likely to reappear and complicate the transition to a post-Assad government. 

 

Syria has other capabilities to strike outside it's borders as well - do those who support going to war against Syria really believe that the consequences would not be severe?  Are we prepared for a civil war in Syria? Have we learned nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan and every other conflict where assumptions about consequences proved completely wrong?  I ask this being fully cognizant of the strategic differences between Iran and Syria, in particular geography and oil.

 

Direct military intervention is ALWAYS uncertain and dangerous.  Advocates for intervention need to do their homework, think through the potential consequences and plan to mitigate them.   If we must intervene, US interests would be better served through covert assistance to the Syrian opposition than through a direct military intervention.  Not only would we have plausible deniability, but the costs to the US would be much less and we would retain the option to militarily intervene should conditions change.

The Super Committee - WASF edition

So, the Super-Committee failed.  I suppose that's not surprising.  The sad thing, though, is that their mandate was only to reduce the deficit by about $1.5 trillion over ten years.  While that sounds like quite a lot, it's only about 12% of total projected deficit over the next decade - expected to be around $13 trillion.  Even if they were successful, we'd still have about $11.5 trillion to go.  If we can't agree on 10% of the problem, how are we going to tackle the other 90%?  WASF

Some Amazing Physics

Ran across this today  on Drudge (emphasis added):

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office is weeks away from launching an unmanned aerial asset to help deputies fight crime. The ShadowHawk helicopter is six-feet long, weighs fifty pounds and fits in the back of an SUV....It’s equipped with an infrared camera that can clearly read a license plate from an elevation of twelve hundred feet. The helicopter cost upwards of $300,000 and was purchased with a grant from the federal government.

Under the right conditions it's certainly possible to "read a license plate" with an infrared (IR) camera, but 99% of the time this simply isn't possible.

 

One Sentence on Regulation

Saw this today and I think it perfectly ecapsulates my thoughts on regulation:

 

Regulation cannot substitute for good policy or compensate for bad policy.

 

Thank you Dayuhan.

When you're wrong, you're wrong

Recently I've been going through some old comments I wrote several years ago.  Here's something I wrote on Phil Carter's defunct Intel-Dump in May, 2007.  The topic is what to do in Afghanistan:

I would prefer to stay longer now so that we don't have to go back in the future. I'm not talking about turning Afghanistan into the Dubai of central Asia - I'm talking about leaving a semi-stable government there that's capable of keeping the Taliban/AQ from regaining what they had in 2001. Compared to Iraq, the Afghan operation is a bargain, in both dollar terms and the level of troops there, most of which are now NATO.

I just don't see how going in, letting our 500 pound gorilla tear up the place, and then leaving, only to rinse and repeat a few years later serves any long-term American interest. It's short-sighted in my view. We're there now - why not stay another 4 or 5 years until the country can defend itself from AQ and the Taliban? How foolish would we be if we left, allowed them to reconstitute and become a global menace once more?

I agree that we could perhaps reduce our presence there and move, over time, to a more traditional SOF-based FID campaign to keep the worst elements out of the country, but simply abandoning Afghanistan would be a huge mistake imo.

Except for the last paragraph, I was pretty much wrong.  At the time I thought I was setting a rather low bar - "a semi-stable government there that's capable of keeping the Taliban/AQ from regaining what they had in 2001."  Others (yes, I'm talking about you, neocons and neo-liberals) were talking about democratic transformation  and pink ponies.  But at this point it is "4-5" years later and what have we achieved? It is a stretch to say that the current Afghan government is even "semi-stable" and it's capabilities WRT the Taliban aren't exactly up to snuff.

 

Perhaps if we'd gone to the SF-based FID campaign I mentioned at the end then things might be different.  But maybe not.  Counter-factuals aren't straightforward and that alternative strategy had its own set of pitfalls.  I do think, though, that would have been better than the inneffective "surge" that is currently in the process of failing, both militarily and politically.

Hope for Humanity

There are a lot of reasons to take a negative view toward the future right now, but it's things like this that give me hope:

 

This combo image, the initial destruction and progress of cleanup after the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami is seen in Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture, northern Japan. The top photo, taken March 13, shows a street covered by debris burnt by a fire. The middle photo, taken June 3, 2011 shows a partial clean-up of the same street, while the bottom photo taken Sept. 1, 2011 shows the area after the debris was removed. AP / Kyodo News

Aghanistan, the Generals and the Colonels

Via Zenpundit comes a great debate on war, Afghanistan and leadership.  I offered my own thoughts in a comment at Carl Prine's Line of Departure, which I'll reproduce below.  It pretty much encapsulates my analysis of the political situation with regard to Afghanistan.  The two colonels mentioned at the end of my comment are the authors of the first two pieces in the debate - Col. Yingling and Col. Gentile.

 

The systemic problems with our military and political elites didn't just come into being by themselves, nor did the miasma that constitutes what passes for national security strategy. These troubles are rooted in our collective national culture working through domestic politics which, I think everyone agrees, is a mess. Underlying Afghanistan and Iraq is a collective belief that America must win - or at least we must be able to delude ourselves into thinking we didn't lose. In Iraq this is what the "Surge" did: It created the perception in the mind of the public that we had "won" Iraq. That perception provided the domestic political space for a "timetable for withdrawal” which was politically impossible only months earlier. The “surge” made a withdrawal strategy broadly acceptable and largely uncontroversial domestically simply because the withdrawal appeared to be the result of success and not bloody failure.

Similarly, Afghanistan today is a war about domestic US politics more than anything else. The deliberations and the decision in 2009 to try another surge was really a domestic political strategy. Biden’s strategy was comparatively politically risky for obvious reasons I won’t belabor here and that’s why it lost out over “surge II.” In short, the 2009 decision was an attempt to replicate the domestic political effects of the Iraq surge and provide the political space for a disengagement from Afghanistan under honorable conditions. There were lots of eager officers and political operatives at all levels who, knowing little of Afghanistan but buoyant with the “success” in Iraq, were eager to make it work. In their minds, all it took was the will and resources. Of course anyone who knew anything about Afghanistan at the time knew this strategy would fail and fail it has.

And so we muddle on, trying to “not lose” this war. The political and military elites are playing a game of musical chairs hoping they are not the one standing when the music finally stops. No one wants to take the political evisceration the public is sure to deal to our elites should they be held responsible by the public for the most powerful nation being defeated by a bunch of poorly trained and equipped irregulars in the so-called "graveyard of empires."

The reality is that Afghanistan is a null set. There is no winning, particularly through the military instrument – the best we can hope for is an honorable disengagement. The key to Afghanistan has always been Pakistan. The Coindinistas never had an answer for how to deal with the “safe-haven” there except for a lot of hand-waving (and the hand-waving is still failing after 10 years, who could have guessed that?) We can make the greatest Army in Afghanistan but it cannot survive without the support of its neighbor to the east. After 10 years, it should be clear that Pakistan isn’t about quit its desire to control Afghanistan in any way it can. Competent generals cannot change this equation. However, Generals with greater moral fortitude would point out this unpleasant fact to the political leadership. Generals with greater moral fortitude wouldn’t keep hand-waving about the Pakistani safe-haven and the centrality of Pakistan to the future of Afghanistan. Generals with greater moral fortitude would “arrange” to be called before Congress to be asked difficult questions and give difficult, career-ending answers (assuming one believes that retirement with full benefits a few years earlier than desired is actually “career ending” - a notion that's ludicrous to me.). Answering Congress is how GO’s can get out of the paradox of subordination to civilian control while publicly speaking necessary truth to power on the limits of military force. Has any GO done this for Afghanistan? Why not? Maybe two Colonels I greatly respect need to rise above their paygrade and do what our Generals won’t.

Signs of the Apocalypse

Maybe the Mayan's and these people are right and maybe I was wrong to dismiss them and use sarcasm and snark to belittle them, for today I had a revelation in the form of a marketing call from Time Warner Cable.  A rough transcript follows:

 

Andy's Iphone rings - it's an 877 number.

Answering, "Hello?"

Nice voice on the other end, "Hello, this is Time Warner calling, how are you doing today?"

"Fine, thanks, and you?" (silent groan as I wait for the sales pitch).

"Great, thanks!  I'm calling today about a new special we are running on home phone service - is this something you'd be interested in hearing more about?"

"Not really, thanks."

"Ok, well thank you for your time and have a good day."

(confused) "Uh, you too."

(End conversation)

 

I've received probably thousands of marketing calls over the years and none of them were nearly this pleasant.  I almost want to call them back and find out what the deal is even though I don't need or want home phone service.  Point being, if this isn't a sign of the apocalypse, I don't know what is.

Moody

My few readers have undoubtedly noticed I haven't written much lately.  To be honest, I just haven't felt like it and the reason for that is that I've been moody, cynical and a bit depressed regarding current events.  My country is still on an unsustainable trajectory and despite some rumblings there isn't yet the political will to change course.  Same for foreign affairs - Libya is turning out as I expected and nothing of note has changed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I don't think OBL's killing will do much with respect to our Afghan policy, but it will be interesting to see what happens with Pakistan.  Killing OBL certainly damaged Al Qaeda, but under the circumstances, it was an even bigger blow to Pakistan.

 

I'm still working on the post on historical effective tax rates, but I've run into a bit of a wall.  For 1979 onward I have CBO data and for earlier decades I have data from Saez and Piketty.  They do overlap and therein is the problem - the effective rates are not the same during the overlap years - in some cases they are very, very different.  It looks like the discrepancy may be because the CBO and Piketty/Saez calculate income differently.  So, I'm not sure what do do at this point since I don't have the expertise or time to do an apples-to-apples analysis.  So that project is on hold for now while I look for more data.