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War Without Law

 

"DEFENSE OPINION - By Thomas J. Wilson, III and Christopher R. Fee

"Those in command and those actually pulling the triggers are well advised that their actions may not be soon forgotten and that the “I was just following orders” defense was rebuffed in Nuremberg and at the My Lai trials of the Vietnam War era.

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When Adm. Alvin Holsey relinquished his command Dec. 12, it was amid growing criticism of attacks that began on his watch. Since the first U.S. strike on an alleged drug smuggler in September, the United States has carried out over 21 attacks in international waters, killing at least 81 people.

The Department of Defense disclosed recently that the first strike in September was quickly followed by another after two people survived the first hit. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims that he didn’t watch the follow-on strike because he had another meeting, a proposition that both beggars belief and calls his priorities into question.

Although the strikes began this fall, the policy behind them took root in February when then acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told his department’s top drug prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn’t interested in interdicting suspected drug vessels anymore. The U.S. should “just sink the boats.” This was a seismic shift in U.S. policy and would require highly questionable justifications for military actions.

Force as a last resort

The Trump administration argues the strikes are necessary to stem the flow of drugs to the U.S., but it is vital to underscore that the law is not simply whatever the president deems it to be. To the contrary, “under international human rights law, the intentional use of lethal force is only permissible as a last resort against individuals who pose an imminent threat to life,” according to Volker Turk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Michael Schmitt, an international law scholar, former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, said the attack that killed the two survivors “is clearly unlawful.” As Schmitt said, “I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water.”

Might does not mean right. Due process is necessary to ensure justice.

Top defense officials and the president continue to justify these actions by claiming America is engaged in “a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” a designation it argues gives it the right to “conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict.”

This rationale is striking, given that when individuals survived a recent U.S. attack they were repatriated, not held as prisoners of war nor arrested as terrorists.

A purge of Judge Advocates General

U.S. forces rely on senior Judge Advocate General lawyers to interpret international law and provide guardrails for commanders as they execute their missions within rules of engagement. In February, the Trump administration summarily fired the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Air Force and Navy. As the former Naval War College professor Tom Nicols puts it, “the first step in turning a military into a personal tool of power is not to fire the generals but to fire the lawyers.”

If sharp and unbiased legal minds are replaced out of hand, the internal system used to check for unlawful orders is effectively broken. With sparse information provided to the public, the attacks can only be assumed not to have risen to the level of compliance with international law, making them extrajudicial executions.

Traditionally, the U.S. Coast Guard, with Navy support, has served as the key force in combating maritime drug smuggling, following set and clear procedures that provide due process in a series of escalating actions designed to bring suspected smugglers to face trial in the United States. Replacing that effort is Operation Southern Spear, whose naval forces include an amphibious ready group with 2,000 embarked U.S. Marines, a carrier strike group and a special operations support ship. This level of force is not there to conduct law enforcement or drug interdiction.

Allies respond by limiting intelligence

These strikes are not executed in a geopolitical vacuum. Reports are surfacing that countries, most notably the United Kingdom, have curtailed intelligence sharing. This is counter-productive on several levels, not least regarding combating drug trafficking—the stated goal of the attacks.

Those in command and those actually pulling the triggers are well advised that their actions may not be soon forgotten and that the “I was just following orders” defense was rebuffed in Nuremberg and at the My Lai trials of the Vietnam War era.

Any assurance to the contrary offered by the current Justice Department has an unspecified “use by” date that may well be sooner than expected. This is not simply an academic debate on the laws of warfare. An officer who receives an order he or she considers illegal has a duty to discuss it with whoever gave the order. If, after that discussion, the officer remains unconvinced of its legality, they must resign their post.

These strikes, of dubious legality, are morally wrong, a blot upon the honor of the United States, and an insult to the brave men and women ordered to carry them out. Unchallenged, they can only threaten our fragile democracy."

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Thomas J. Wilson, III is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, and Christopher R. Fee is Graeff Professor at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Fee is also a faculty advisor to the college’s Eisenhower Institute and co-clerk of the northeast region of the American Friends Service Committee.

‘We Will Do This Again,’ Afghanistan IG Warned In 2021 Of Future Drawn-Out Wars

 

SIGAR QUARTERLY REPORT - July 2021

"MILITARY TIMES" By Meghann Myers

"Sopko is not, he said, optimistic that the national security establishment will internalize those lessons.

“Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we’re never going to do this again,” he said. “That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam: we’re never going to do this again. Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again.”

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"The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction ripped apart the government’s handling of two decades of operations in Afghanistan, pointing to shifting goal posts and unrealistic timelines as key reasons why the U.S. withdrawal is yielding Taliban gains against ineffective Afghan security forces.

The most recent SIGAR quarterly report, released Thursday, tells the same story it’s been telling all along, John Sopko told reporters at Defense Writers Group event.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been reading our reports for at least the nine years ... that I’ve been there,” he said. “We’ve been highlighting problems with our train, advise and assist mission with the Afghan military.”

In the wake of the Biden administration’s May announcement that all troops and contractors would be out by the end of August, public backlash has ranged from disappointment at the war’s “failure” to lamentations that the U.S. is withdrawing before the job has been finished.

The issue, Sopko said, is that “the job” has had many faces since fall 2001. What started as a mission to dismantle the Taliban government that allowed al-Qaida to train in Afghanistan morphed into a nation-building exercise, an effort to beat back numerous insurgent groups and strengthen a central Afghan government and military that would eventually fend for itself.

That effort was more involved than the Marshall Plan, Sopko said, the U.S.-led program to rebuild Europe after World War II.

Whether Afghanistan’s government holds up after the U.S. withdrawal will eventually play out, but when the senior-most American national security officials talk about the reasons for the drawdown, they pin it to one goal: Afghanistan is not currently a place where a terrorist group can plan and train for an attack on the United States. Ergo, mission accomplished.

Sopko quipped that military leadership on the ground “turned the corner” so many times that they’ve been going in circles for years, and it appears the U.S. has settled back into its original goal in Afghanistan.

“Every time we took a look at the assessment tools, our U.S. military would change the goal posts and say, ‘Oh no, no, that’s not the test you want to do,’ to raising serious questions about the sustainability of all this high-tech hardware we gave them,” he said. “And to the real serious problem, that we focused on the more urgent warfighting and not looking at the what I call the ‘long tail,’ the whole issue of logistics.”

Afghanistan war cost more than $2T and 240,000 lives, report finds

Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in July that the Afghan National Defense Security Forces have the “capability” to keep the Taliban at bay. But whether they have the know-how and the wherewithal is another issue.

For example, Sopko mentioned that many conventional Afghan National Army units refuse to do basic tasks like route clearance or checkpoint security without the help of the country’s very small special forces contingent, therefore wasting their capacity and burning them out at the same time.

But whenever U.S. leadership in Afghanistan was asked to show progress, he said, they changed the metrics.

“And every time we went in, the U.S. military changed the goal posts, and made it easier to show success. And then finally, when they couldn’t even do that, they classified the assessment tool,” he said. “So, they knew how bad the Afghan military was. And if you had a clearance, you could find out, but the average American, the average taxpayer, the average congressman, the average person working in the embassy wouldn’t know how bad it was.”

The Afghan air force is an example of a success story, Sopko said, because their pilots are competent and they are able to fly their own combat missions. But they rely on contracted maintenance because there has not been a similar effort to train up mechanics.

“Our own Air Force told us, as we have reported time and again, you can’t turn somebody into a UH-60 pilot overnight, or a level one or level two or level three mechanic overnight,” he said. “These take months, and that is one of the serious problems we raised with not only the ANDSF train, advise and assist, but overall with reconstruction.”

A culture of wishful thinking set the ANDSF up for failure.

“We’ve highlighted time and again: we have unrealistic timelines for all of our work, and that is what now is causing the problems you see with the military,” Sopko added.

Whether the national security establishment learns anything from the last 20 years remains to be seen, though Sopko did make a plug for the SIGAR’s soon-to-be released Afghanistan lessons learned report as a resource.

“...what you see in Afghanistan is the is evidence of problems of our own government,” Sopko said. “You know, we have a lousy [human resources] system ... we have a lousy procurement system in place. And, you know, we have ... a lousy way of hiring people. You need the best people for the job, and firing the bad people. And we have a lousy way for planning, and we also have a lousy way of collecting lessons or observations for major actions like we did in Afghanistan.”

‘We will do this again,’ Afghanistan IG warns of future drawn-out wars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Meghann Myersis the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.

The Awful Arithmetic Of Our Wars

 

"DEFENSE ONE" By Peter W. Singer

"The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy."

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 "At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. 

Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat.

Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. 

The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies. 

Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch.

The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles' rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) 

Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up this month.

The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). 

To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. 

But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500.

Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip.

Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more.  It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles. 

The math is arguably even worse when we're on the defense. 

In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. 

This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions. 

Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. 

As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​ 

When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. 

The 2025 version is that if we don't master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle."

The awful arithmetic of our wars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.

What It Means To Kill in Combat

 

"DEFENSE ONE"By Phil Zabriskie

"The killing a country does through its soldiers is part of its fabric and identity. The less it is examined, the less a country will know about itself, its impulses, and the impact of what it has trained and dispatched its sons and daughters to do."

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"If a war fails to achieve its stated objectives—as Vietnam did—it can make the reasons for killing even harder to accept. Some recent vets of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the psychiatrist, are already asking, “What was it all for?”

This is not to cast troops who kill in combat as victims. They should carry the weight of what they did. But they should not be forced to carry it alone. Their leadership, from the company level all the way to the Chief of Staff, is part of every killing that’s carried out. So too are the civilian architects of these wars. And the rest of us bear some responsibility as well.

The killing a country does through its soldiers is part of its fabric and identity. The less it is examined, the less a country will know about itself, its impulses, and the impact of what it has trained and dispatched its sons and daughters to do.

A more honest conversation about what war is and what war does is a good place to start. Those who [called] for boots on the ground in Iraq, Syria, or anywhere else, should be first to have it. They should understand and explain exactly what it [means] if troops are deployed, and they should press the military to give its charges tools that not only help them kill when they should, but also how to live with the killing they’ve done later in life.

More counseling must be made available as well, as part of the broader overhaul of the VA, and steps taken to remove the stigma that still exists around seeking help for the psychological wounds of war. And no one should ask a veteran if he or she has killed anybody unless they really want to hear the answer—and are prepared to listen."

What It Means To Kill In Combat

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Phil Zabriskie, a writer living in New York, is the author of The Kill Switch. Previously, he lived and worked throughout Asia and the Middle East, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Small Business Mentoring And Social Networking

"SMALLTOFEDS" By Ken larson "

A 19 year veteran mentor's critical review of 2 major non-profit small business mentoring web sites and the role of social networking

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"SCORE

From 2006 to 2011, I supported SCORE as a volunteer counselor.  During some years I had several hundred clients. The web site was dynamic, fast, easily accessed and fairly simple. 

SCORE is a nonprofit organization and a resource partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). The web site operation is run from SCORE HQ in Herndon, Virginia.  Only U.S. Citizens are eligible to participate since it has been heavily funded by SBA government tax dollars.  

SCORE management elected a complicated redesign of the site in 2011. The original design of the site was radically changed.  

I was part of the system conversion test team as a high volume mentor. I warned the conversion team that my tests were failing, I provided detailed data on necessary fixes. The site was rolled out in May of 2011 and crashed.  I moved on to MicroMentor to continue my volunteer work. 

I rejoined SCORE in March of 2019 principally to handle veteran cases referred to SCORE by the SBA.  I continued to conduct my Micromentor volunteer work.

To once again become a SCORE counselor,  I underwent a new member  background check and a two week training program.  I found the ability to see a client profile to whom I was not connected was gone.  SCORE management now screened mentor requests and decided which mentor should get them. 

Every exchange with an entrepreneur is required to be reported by the mentor. The number of hours expended and background provided to the entrepreneur on the content of a conversation is necessary.  A code of ethics training course on conflict interest is required every year for all mentors. 

30% of my clients now come through SCORE. These are mostly veterans and other small businesses who are pursuing small business federal government contracting and small business innovative research programs.

The federal government has recently elected to discontinue funding SCORE. It has had a dramatic impact on the operation of the organization and small business clients.

MicroMentor

MicroMentor is a "Two Way Street" meeting place for entrepreneurs to select a mentor and propose a mentoring relationship and vice versa. I have been a Mentor on MicroMentor for over 13 years, joining the site when the SCORE web site crashed. 

MicroMentor is worldwide NGO. The MicroMentor web site operations are managed at facilities in Portland Oregon. 

Both mentor and entrepreneur can see each other's backgrounds and initiate the process. Thereafter, with no capacity for attachments and a perceived need for privacy by many, the exchange generally moves to email and evolves in a manner the customer support organization does not see.

With the discontinuation of the Mentor Rating feature, MicroMentor site management gets little feedback from entrepreneurs on the quality of the help they have received unless they (the entrepreneur) make a point of commenting by contacting customer support, or  marketing and PR staffs contact individuals entrepreneurs. 

Thus, in its simplest form,  MicroMentor is a bulletin board of individuals who seek help and those who are willing to provide it if they so choose, while looking at each other's profiles.

The MicroMentor Q&A feature is a neat catalyst that promotes exchanges and offers the opportunity to exhibit entrepreneur problems, interests and challenges, as well as mentor knowledge and expertise. It fosters a healthy learning environment in itself by simple observation and allows a human interaction dynamic to occur.

Customer support and control of spamming has been superb. MicroMentor Q&A is a very under-rated feature of the site. 

MicroMentor is international. Participants throughout the world have varying outlooks and skills, based on their culture, customs, values and conditions. 

The natural dynamics of human interaction when a match occurs and when circumstances exist at the time for potential success is where mentoring succeeds. 

The system promotion, volume and reach are its greatest assets in creating the probability that positive mentoring dynamics will occur.  The ability of entrepreneurs and mentors to see one another's backgrounds and communicate directly is a major asset of the site. 

70 % of my client now come through MicroMentor. 40% of those are on the continent of Africa in multiple countries.

Integrated Social Networking 

The vast majority of my cases over the last 19 years have come to me at both SCORE and MicroMentor from social networking on the Web. LinkedIn, in particular, is a vast reservoir of clients and referrals.

3 out of 5 MIcroMentor clients with whom I work already have a profile on LinkedIn when I begin working with them. If they do not, I suggest they create one. In my view,  a LinkedIn individual and company profile is a vital part of any small company marketing plan, since it is the largest professional business web site in the world and it is FREE.

My two blogs, "Rose Covered Glasses" and "Smalltofeds" generate mentorship users as well by referral. Both blogs are free to me  on Google except for a $10 dollar annual fee to own the "Smalltofeds" domain name. That fee has not changed in 17 years.

Were I to recommend any topic for Mentor and Entrepreneur  training, I would suggest social networking guidance. It has been, and will continue to be, the wave of the future. Why Social Network To Promote Your Small Business?

Small Business Mentoring And Social Networking