Cold War Transition, Part III: The Navy

Part I (Army), here

Part II (Air Force) here

Like the Army and Air Force, the Navy avoided moving away from the comfort of its Cold War strategy. During the first post-Soviet, the admirals clung to the philosophy that had driven acquisitions during the Cold War. That strategy had been based on controlling the sea, following the precepts of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Navy built a large fleet that would, when war started, wrest control of the oceans from the USSR and her communist allies. The main theaters of battle were the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf. The main threats were Soviet attack submarines, missile-armed surface ships, and attack planes flying from land. To fight in these theaters and against this enemy, the Navy built a fleet of aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and cruisers optimized to defend against air attack. Allied to that was submarines carrying a larger proportion of the American nuclear deterrent, whose job was to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the Navy responded to shrinking defense budgets by reducing the fleet rather than changing it. Thus, instead of 15 aircraft carriers, the Navy went down to 11. Similar reductions occurred in the number of attack submarines, cruisers, and ballistic missile submarines. This was the Cold War strategy, miniaturized. Despite the fact that no other nation in the world has anywhere near the naval power needed to dispute American control of the oceans (the sum total of the world’s aircraft carriers are fewer than the number the United States currently deploys), the U.S. still operates a fleet aimed at fighting exactly such a battle.

Ordinary

Also posted at The Jamestown Project blog

Why is Barack Obama winning this election? Just over a week before the election, the Democratic nominee enjoys substantial leads in most polls, popular and electoral both. That is no guarantee of ultimate victory: the only poll that counts is November 4th, as George Dewey found out to his cost in 1948, but nonetheless, right at this moment, the Illinois Senator is clearly ahead.

How did he get to this point?

There is an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine from this past weekend, looking at the inner workings of the McCain campaign and the five different narratives that they’ve tried to push to the American people since summer 2008. None of them have caught hold, leaving the McCain people scratching their heads. But what is absent from the article is any sense of WHY none of these narratives have worked. The reporter quotes the McCain as thinking that the media is in the tank for Obama, makes note of Sarah Palin’s horrendous inexperience, and indirectly points to McCain’s baffled and angry performances in the debates. But there is no sense that the Obama campaign may have played a role. The article imputes that it is the McCain campaign’s mistakes that are responsible. In this formulation, McCain is losing, rather than Obama winning.

I write this post to argue with that formulation, by focusing on one particular strategy of the Obama campaign. Before I talk about that, though, let me look at the larger, systemic factors that are hindering the Republicans this election cycle. First, the nation is undergoing a partisan realignment. In the 1970s and 80s, the South realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans. 1976 was the last gasp of the old Democratic “Solid South.” (Look at Jimmy Carter’s winning electoral map and imagine a Democratic candidate getting that layout today). The 2000s have been about the northeast and far west solidly realigning to the Democrats. In the 1950s and 60s, California was reliably Republican. Now, it is just as reliably Democratic. In the 1990s, more and more northeastern states have become reliably Democratic, to the point that a Republican Congressperson from a northeastern state is a rare bird, indeed (see Clinton’s electoral map in 1996). That partisan realignment is helping Obama. Also helping Obama is, of course, President Bush, who has the lowest approval ratings of any President in modern history, and has historians arguing whether he is the worst President ever or only in the top-5 worst.

More, Iraq has become firmly entrenched in the American mind as a disaster, and such a formulation takes a long time to dislodge. It took years after 2003-05 for the U.S. public to swing against the war, but once having swung, that public is not going back. This, despite the fact that American efforts in Iraq have substantially toned down the violence there. The public has decided and they’re not going to change their mind easily. Finally, of course, the financial crisis of the last few months have put a spotlight, as did Hurricane Katrina, on the venality, greed, and sheer impressive incompetence of President Bush and the disastrous economic polices of his administration.

With all that, however, the Obama campaign has run a strategically masterful and tactically smart campaign. I want to highlight one particular aspect of that campaign by looking at Obama’s personality. During the primaries, Obama built his image as a charismatic orator whose soaring speeches elevated and inspired. In this sense, his political persona echoed that of many early African-American figures, including Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr. But that image proved vulnerable to counterattack in several ways. First, the soaring rhetoric, for many white Americans, echoed the language not of Martin Luther King, Jr., but of Jeremiah Wright, an association that did not help Obama. Second, Obama’s speechmaking was different from modern Presidents who, if they were good speakers, have adopted a faux-traditional American style of “just plain folks.” Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, the two best post-1945 Presidential speakers, both used a conversational speaking approach that pushed the message that they were regular guys. Obama’s speeches did not. Since (fairly or not) Obama was also surrounded by a perception of alienness (both because he was African-American, and because he had lived outside the U.S. for a substantial period), that lack added to another of his weaknesses. Finally, Obama’s charisma opened the door for the McCain campaign to attack him as a shallow, inexperienced celebrity, the Paris Hilton of American politics, a line of attack that was resonating over the summer of 2008.

It stopped resonating, however because after his convention speech Obama changed his political persona substantially. The convention speech itself signaled the change by being both soaring and uncharacteristically wonkish. And in the three debates, there was little trace of the charismatic orator. Instead, Obama was sober, unruffled, and at pains to be deeply conversant with specific policies and policy ideas. The contrast was remarkable, and even more so when you consider that _McCain_ came off as the firebrand.

Clearly, the Obama campaign had realized the vulnerabilities listed above and decided to preempt them. What had worked to rally the base was not what was needed in the general election, and so Obama changed his strategy. Instead of charisma, the message was one of steadiness; instead of celebrity, it was of seriousness. Before the convention, Obama frequently appeared in suit and tie. After the convention, he almost always appeared in a suit without tie, or a tie without the suit coat. The message, as was the careful language and personality, was that Obama was a regular guy. Here he was not a working Joe, but a middle-class man with middle class concerns about family and health care and retirement. He was, in a word, ordinary. He was not alien, or strange, or other, but ordinary. And it is that strategic shift that has left the McCain campaign flailing, not merely their own mistakes. You can’t sell celebrity as the tag for someone ordinary. You can’t sell radical leftist for someone ordinary. You can’t sell terrorist for someone ordinary. None of the narratives that the Times’ article listed have resonated with Americans so far because they have seen the careful, measured Barack Obama for themselves and believe him, above all, to be familiar. That shift—not an easy one to make in the middle of a campaign—undercut every Republican argument against Obama and left them groping every few weeks for a new narrative. That shift—not an easy one to make in the middle of a campaign—was genius.

Cold War Transition, Part II: The Air Force

Part I (Army), here

The United States Air Force has been the poster child for avoiding the cold war transition. Perhaps more than any other service, the USAF has insisted on purchasing weapons and promulgating doctrines that would be just as applicable in 1978 as in 2008. The capabilities have changed, but the mind set has not. The “fighter mafia” within the Air Force, still aglow after its decades-ago triumph over the “bomber mafia,” has acquired more and more technologically advanced fighter planes, such as the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Advanced Strike Fighter, brimming with Mach-speed capability and stealth features, and designed to dominate the air against any and all comers.

The problem has been several fold. First, there aren’t any “comers.” There are no rivals to the United States for air superiority anywhere in the world. The Russian Air Force is a generation out of date, with pilots who get little in the way of training flights. The Chinese Air Force is better, but is a handmaiden to the dominant Chinese Army. Nowhere in the world is there an air force that could offer a sustained challenge to the current USAF, let alone the next generation. Second, the programs have fallen prey to the same procurement issues that dogged the Army and Navy. A lack of effective contractor oversight, allied with the continual addition of expensive new features by the Pentagon far into the acquisitions process, has sent the price of new planes skyrocketing. An F-15 Eagle, the previous generation air superiority fighter, cost about $43 million dollars per plane (in 1998 dollars). The F-22, its successor, costs roughly $187 million (2006 dollars), about four times as much.

Third, and most important, the Air Force is vulnerable to a revolutionary transformation now underway, one which the top brass of the service are ignoring or downplaying. Like the battleship commanders in the 1930s tried to ignore the rise of the aircraft carriers until it was too late, the current Air Force is trying to sideline a paradigm shifting air weapon that could displace most current planes. I speak of the unmanned aerial vehicle, remotely controlled by a ground-based controller. UAVs have continuing and spectacular advantages over manned planes. Keeping pilots alive and comfortable requires a lot of equipment and weight in current planes. It limits the maneuvers they can undertake. It shortens the time those planes can be aloft. UAVs suffer little from those limitations. They can be smaller, maneuver more quickly, and be in the air longer. At the moment, UAV development is still deeply in its infancy, akin to manned flight in the years after the Wright Brothers carefully lifted off from Kitty Hawk. But it will progress rapidly, as did aviation. Within the next few decades it is likely that unmanned planes will have displaced manned planes as the dominant aerial weapon. Other countries, like India think so.

If the Air Force (like the Navy) stays locked into its Cold War mindset, it risks getting leapfrogged by countries like India or China. Neither of those is likely to catch up to the United States in conventional planes, so they have every incentive to try a game-changing play by committing wholesale to UAVs. Low-cost remotely controlled vehicles could present a serious threat to American air superiority and air operations through sheer numbers, let alone the advantages that each UAV would have in maneuverability and range. And the United States military has gotten deeply used to having air superiority; so used to it that they now assume it to be the case. Such an ominous scenario is not likely anytime soon, but in the medium term it is all too likely. The Navy discovered the dominating value of carrier aviation on December 7, 1941, much to America’s cost. It would be wise for the Air Force to avoid such a similarly harsh lesson.

8 Reasons I Didn’t Watch the Veep Debate: live-not-blogging

Also posted here.

I haven’t adjusted to the 21st century yet, so I still approach blog posts like Ralph Ellison working on novel #2. Which is to say: it takes me forever to write them. I thought the Biden-Palin face-off tonight would be an opportunity to get in touch with my inner Joyce Carol Oates and start writing faster. But I couldn’t bring myself to watch the bloody thing, much less to do so in the spirit needed to write about it.

So instead I thought I’d live-blog about why I didn’t watch the debate. Here goes….

1. I couldn’t bear the anxiety. Someone, I forget who, recently wrote that watching Palin lately has been like watching a drunk relative give a toast at a wedding reception – you’re pretty sure it’s going to go badly, but you don’t know when, or just how embarrassing it will be. This is nerve-wracking, even if you don’t care for the woman or her politics.

2. I couldn’t bear the anxiety, part 2: Joe Biden’s foot hasn’t hung out with his mouth in a while, and they’re due for a reunion.

3. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, as one question would trump all others in my mind: is it me, or has Biden’s forehead undergone a Kerry-like transformation, and become as tight as the head of a snare drum? Or was I just not paying attention before?

4. I can’t get over the fact that the polls are still close. I mean, it sometimes seems that the GOP isn’t even trying this time (and with W’s messes to clean up, why would they?). But public opinion is still pretty evenly split. Which makes me alternately irritated, annoyed, and depressed. None of these emotional states, it turns out, is particularly conducive to registering and reflecting on a live debate. Having appealed to the polls, though…

5. …I resent being seduced into thinking about serious politics in horse race terms. Or into thinking about horse races instead of serious politics and policy. As I’ve said here before, polls have their place, and if they work for you then God bless. But the media conversations around the debates tend to focus obsessively on how the candidates’ performances move the poll numbers, rather than on what the candidates’ performances and arguments reveal about their fitness to govern. And resentment isn’t great for analysis either. Now, as long as I’m busting on the media…

6. …every time I turned on the news this week, the obligatory lead stories about the financial ‘bailout’ quickly turned into punditizing about the politics of the bailout – instead of, I dunno, providing some detail on various elements of the various plans, and inviting economists to think aloud about how they would work. And then, as quickly as possible, they started punditizing about this dadblasted debate. So by airtime tonight, I was already sick of the bloody thing.

7. Continuing with the resentment vibe: I resent being sold a slickly produced commercial for the two establishment parties, and being told that it’s an exercise in, or instrument of, democracy. If you want a real debate, add the veep candidates for the greens and the libertarians to the docket. To go old school for a bit, and channel John Stuart Mill, or Darwin: pitting the Republocrats against a wider variety of alternative perspectives would only strengthen them. It would make them defend certain basic assumptions that have for too long enjoyed a free pass – assumptions about, for example, the role of corporations in defense policy and managing the economy, and about the centrality of the military, or of militarists, in setting priorities for foreign policy and domestic spending. And third party challenges would help legitimate the ruling parties in the eyes of the public – if they survived the challenges, that is. Instead we get people who disagree about many things, it’s true, but who also agree on many things, and things of substance, from same-sex marriage to Israel and the Pentagon budget – and the larded-up bailout package that passed the Senate today.

8. Over the past week I’ve read bits of a biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, and smaller bits of a semi-biographical study of the radical activist Claudia Jones. Irrespective of whether one agrees with these women on the issues, their struggles and ambitions effectively indict the narrowness and meanness of our politics today. People are homeless, hungry, and dying, here in the US but also in Iraq, in Haiti, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, thanks in part to the shortsightedness of our policies. (Precision bombs and structural adjustment programs, anyone?) And we’re talking about pigs and pit bulls? (That last sung to the tune of the old Allen Iverson favorite, ‘We’re talking about _practice_…?’)

Candidates at War

Also published here

Presidential candidates, for good or ill, are crucially defined by war. Perceptions of the candidate and, less obviously, perceptions by the candidate are influenced by their experiences of war. In recent elections, the images of George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were shaped by their relationship to World War II. Similarly, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John Kerry found themselves defined by the Vietnam War. And it is not just any war that does the defining. Instead, it is the generational war, the dominant war of a particular era: Vietnam, for example, rather than Panama.

What wars define the candidates of 2008? For Senator John McCain, the answer is easy: Vietnam. His years as a POW are foundational to him, and the McCain campaign and McCain himself highlight those experiences as much as possible. Senator Barack Obama, by contrast, came of age in a military era that, as much as anything, was about recovering from Vietnam. The two candidates’ differing martial experiences has led to a media narrative that gives the advantage of experience to McCain.

But what is not discussed as often is how the wars shape not just the perceptions of candidates, but their outlooks. Wars mold how candidates view the world. The war that shaped President Bush’s viewpoint and those around him—Cheney and Rumsfeld particularly—was the Cold War, the decades-long struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, almost immediately after 9/11, the administration looked for a nation to blame. The target became not Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but Iraq. This was a classic Cold War reaction, when guerrilla or terrorist movements around the world were fronts for one side or the other. So the Bush administration found itself simply unable to believe that Al Qaeda had acted without some kind of state support. There had to be an “axis of evil.” Iraq would become an example of the perils of being part of that axis.

We have seen how that turned out. Iraq surely became an example, but one of imperial hubris. So the question for 2008 is not just what war shapes each candidate’s image, but also what war shapes each candidate’s outlook? In this case, McCain’s major war is not Vietnam, but—just as it was for Bush—the Cold War. The Senator from Arizona came to adulthood in the 1950s, the era of a growing nuclear threat and the Berlin Wall. His service in Vietnam was the suspended animation of a POW. His command experience afterwards was defined by the confrontation with the Soviet Union. McCain views the world with the same Cold War perspective that the Bush administration brought to the table, characterized by a continuing fixation on nation-states. Witness the two foreign policies about which McCain is insistent: staying in Iraq and confronting Iran. McCain, like Bush, cannot understand our deeply fractured world without reaching for the comforting simplicity of the Cold War, a reaction notably on display when Russia invaded Georgia. Experience leads McCain to take refuge in a vision driven by a comforting fantasy, not by the dangerous reality.

Obama’s outlook, by contrast, was defined in a more complex period. The late 1980s and 1990s, when the Senator from Illinois came of political age, was an era of collapse and confusion. The fall of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War seemed to usher in a period of American dominance, only for a wave of terrorist attacks to reveal a world dominated less by nations and more by ideologies and movements that cross international boundaries. Obama’s focus on Afghanistan and desire to wind things down in Iraq are reflections of a world in which war has become globalized and personalized, and where states are less important than global networks: Al-Qaeda, rather than Iraq.

McCain has more experience than Obama, but it is the experience of a previous generation, whose comprehension of the world coexists uneasily with the radically-changed facts on the ground. “9/11 changed everything” was repeated endlessly after the towers fell. In 2008, only one candidate behaves as if that is true.