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We Are Not Winning this War, Because We Cannot Win It:

There were some harsh lessons for the USSR in Afgahnistan, and an objective reading of American involvement in Iraq is that we decided to confirm everyone of them by repeating each and every one of the mistakes that the USSR made.

What leaps out looking at the documents available from the USSR and its invasion and occupation in Afghanistan, are the eerie parallels to the Downing Street Memos. In both cases the picture emerges of an ideologically rigid hierarchy committed to particular end states, regardless of whether they had the means to achieve them. To go even farther, in both cases there was an obsession with how the action would be framed, and with managing the proxies and internal bureaucracy - instead of facing the facts on the mission.

In the United States General Tommy Franks put forward a deployment plan that involved a two prong assault and over 300,000 troops. This was rejected by Rumsfeld - a member of the American cabinet, the equivalent to the USSR's politburo. Instead an invasion with half that number went forward. Rumsfeld, like his Soviet predecessors, argued that the superiority of military hardware  would make this number sufficient for the mission.

The same objections that the Soviet General Staff raised to the Afghanistan mission were raised by the British military directory - the troops were insufficient for the "total victory" endstate envisioned - that is installation of a compliant and stable regime. The British pointed out that inferior endstates might have to be accepted. It is interesting that in a 1986 meeting of the politburo, the same realization was reached by Andrei Gromyko - that total victory was outside of Soviet grasp given the resources.

Once in Afghanistan the Soviet Ground Forces took their heaviest casualties keeping the road network open. They found that they were not fighting set piece battles against a military that drew its strength from a working economy, but a military that drew its strength from a militia reserve of un and underemployed. Unlike fighting a state actor - which is easier to defeat as its economy gets worse, fighting a guerilla war is the reverse, the guerilla movement gets stronger as the economy worsens.

Looking at the location of US military fatalities since the war, the same pattern emerges - the US takes its deaths trying to maintain order in the cities, and in trying to hold the roads. The interior areas of the country are virtually ceded to the insurgency. The insurgency does not draw its strength from towns that produce a surplus to be used in fighting, but from the destruction of the economic system from before.

This problem - that the forces involved were not large enough to force a military victory, but they were too expensive to allow a full scale reconstruction - haunted Soviet post-mortems in 1986 and 1987. These failures are already being admitted by American planners and internal critics of the war in Iraq.  The conclusion of the USSR's policy elite was that invasion was a mistake, and that the invasion was a lost cause long before withdrawal was considered.

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This lead to the converse problem of withdrawal: after invasion and full strategic committment, the vital national interest was political victory itself. This is why, in 1986, the politburo was still worried about who would be in charge of this or that function, who would visit Moscow, who would get how much policy freedom. There was no concern about what interest was at stake, because the sunk political capital became too valuable to lose.

The military instrument is meant to defeat and destroy the will of a nation to fight, and the war material it uses to fight with. A military instrument in combat stance cannot win a political endstate. It is not a failure of troops to fail to secure a politcal victory, because it is not their mission to do so, nor are they trained or equipped to do so. One might as well criticise them for not being able to launch a manned probe to Mars.

In the end, Iraq cannot be won, because there is nothing there to win. It was a move made to reduce the command and control stress - to remove a bullet point from the daily agenda, "contain Saddam's latest bonehead attempt to get WMD".

Pearl Harbor.

Still recall the oil bubbiling up.

I would prefer a mechanism that caused them to get even less done. A government working together invariably is working against us. Bleh.

Yep. No government results in me governing me, and that's good government. 

But on a deeper level, I'm not convinced de-escalation is possible, at least not with any meaningful or lasting effects. What we have is a conflict over the fundamental ideas the country will be based on in the future. Now that the Right is increasingly throwing the Constitution out as much as the Left, I don't much care who wins it. Either way we're screwed.

If anything I would prefer to keep the tension high, both Parties are straining under it and both are dividing into essentially two camps. Might as well push them until they break.

What an idea to make the CEV unnecessarily heavy just for

sending a clear message both to the EELV manufacturers and to the U.S. Air Force, who funded much of the EELV development effort.

What is the message? The message is that Griffin isn't planning on using their rockets.

That's an unusual approach to make the future lunar infrastructure cost effective, I'd say.