ISIS Training Camps Proliferating Rapidly In Iraq and Syria

Jihadist training camps proliferate in Iraq and Syria

Bill Roggio & Caleb Weiss

The Long War Journal

October 24, 2014

Since the Syrian civil war began in the spring of 2011, the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and other allied jihadist groups have operated more than 30 training camps inside Iraq and Syria. While global jihadist groups have primarily used camps to indoctrinate and train fighters for local insurgencies as part of the effort to establish a global caliphate, in the past al Qaeda has used its camps to support attacks against the West.

The Long War Journal has compiled information on the camps from jihadist videos, news accounts, and US military press releases that note airstrikes against the training facilities. It is unclear if all of the training camps are currently in operation. In addition, this analysis is compiled using publicly-available evidence. It is likely that some training camps are not advertised.

Since the beginning of 2012, a total of 37 camps have been identified as being operational. Of those camps, 28 are in Syria, and nine are in Iraq.

The Islamic State, the al Qaeda splinter group that was disowned by al Qaeda’s general command in February 2014, operates the largest number of training facilities, with eight camps in Iraq and 12 more in Syria.

In Iraq, the Islamic State has operated three camps in Anbar province, two in Salahaddin, two in Ninewa, and one more in Kirkuk.

In Syria, the Islamic State has run six facilities in Aleppo province, two in Deir al Zour, and one each in Hasakah, Raqqah, Latakia, and Damascus.

The Al Nusrah Front, which is al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, has run seven camps in the country; two each in Deir al Zour and Aleppo, and one each in Idlib, Homs, and Daraa. The camps in Deir al Zour and Raqqah are thought to be no longer operational after the Islamic State took control of the areas. The Al Nusrah Front camps are also likely the same camps used by the so-called Khorasan group, which is led by senior al Qaeda leaders and is embedded within Al Nusrah. Al Qaeda’s Khorasan group seeks to conduct attacks against the West.

Ten more camps are run by jihadist groups allied with the Al Nusrah Front. Nine training facilities are in Syria, and one, run by Ansar al Islam, is in Iraq. Two of the camps in Syria are operated by Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar and Junud al Sham. In September 2014, Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar was listed by the US as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group, and Murad Margoshvilli, the leader of the Junud al Sham, was named a global terrorist.

Training for insurgencies and for terrorist attacks

In the past, al Qaeda has used its network of camps not only to train fighters to battle in local insurgencies, but also to identify potential recruits as well as support a host of allied jihadist groups.

The 9/11 Commission Report detailed how al Qaeda used its sanctuary in Afghanistan prior to the attacks on the US to operate camps and expand its ties to jihadist groups throughout the world:

The alliance with the Taliban provided al Qaeda a sanctuary in which to train and indoctrinate fighters and terrorists, import weapons, forge ties with other jihad groups and leaders, and plot and staff terrorist schemes. While Bin Ladin maintained his own al Qaeda guesthouses and camps for vetting and training recruits, he also provided support to and benefited from the broad infrastructure of such facilities in Afghanistan made available to the global network of Islamist movements. U.S. intelligence estimates put the total number of fighters who underwent instruction in Bin Ladin-supported camps in Afghanistan from 1996 through 9/11 at 10,000 to 20,000.

In addition to training fighters and special operators, this larger network of guesthouses and camps provided a mechanism by which al Qaeda could screen and vet candidates for induction into its own organization. Thousands flowed through the camps, but no more than a few hundred seem to have become al Qaeda members. From the time of its founding, al Qaeda had employed training and indoctrination to identify “worthy” candidates.

Here’s Everything Wrong with the White House’s War on the Islamic State

BY PETER CERTO, 
OCTOBER 2, 2014
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The Obama administration’s war plans in Iraq and Syria are illegal, ill-conceived, and destined to fail. Here's what the U.S.—and you—can do instead. 

If Barack Obama owes his presidency to one thing, it was the good sense he had back in 2002 to call George W. Bush’s plans to go to war in Iraq what they were: “dumb.” (The war was many other things too—illegal, cynical, not to mention disastrous—but “dumb” was pretty good for a guy running for Senate back when both parties had largely lined up behind the war.)

Since then, Obama’s had his ups and downs with the antiwar voters who delivered his 2008 nomination and subsequent election. But throughout the arguments over drones, Afghanistan, Libya, and NSA spying—among other issues—Obama could always come back to these voters and say: Hey, at least I ended the war in Iraq. What do you think the Republicans would have done?

But now, with scarcely a whisper of serious debate, Obama has become the fourth consecutive U.S. president to launch a war in Iraq—and in fact has outdone his predecessors by spreading the war to Syria as well, launching strikes not only on fighters linked to the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) but also on the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and al-Khorasan.

This was no minor escalation. According to the Washington Post, the United States and its Arab allies dropped more explosives on Syria in their first engagement there than U.S. forces had dropped over all of Iraq in the preceding month. It was the largest single U.S. military operation since NATO’s intervention in Libya was launched back in 2011.

War planners are predicting that the latest conflict could rage for three years or longer, meaning Obama will bequeath to his successor a quagmire much like the one he inherited—the one he’d so distinguished himself by opposing and subsequently ending. That’ll make five U.S. presidents at war in Iraq and beyond in a row.

Polls show some significant public support for air strikes against IS, albeit alongside ample wariness about getting dragged in too far. Support for action against IS is easy enough to understand: Many fair-minded people otherwise weary of war in the Middle East are appalled by the brutality of IS and feel compelled to “do something” to stop them.

And we should do something. But not this.

We’ll come to regret this war, potentially long before it’s had three years to run its course. Here’s why.

This war is illegal.

So, first thing’s first: This war is unmistakably illegal.

Under international law—at least as defined by the UN Charter, to which the United States is a founding signatory—one country can only legally launch attacks inside another under one of three conditions: if the intervention is authorized by the UN Security Council; if it’s a cut-and-dry case of self-defense; or if assistance is requested by the other country’s government.

It’s true that in Iraq at least, the government requested U.S. assistance in stemming the spread of IS—an intervention promoted in Washington as part of an effort to prevent the genocide of Iraqi religious minorities like the Yazidis (remember them?). Yet the United States has continued launching strikes on IS positions in Iraq long after the crisis on Mt. Sinjar was putatively resolved.

The Ghosts of Gaza: Israel’s Soldier Suicides

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Were Israeli soldiers so haunted by what they saw and did in the last Gaza war that they took their own lives? What role did their zealous commander play?

HAIFA, Israel—More than two months after the end of Israel’s latest offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, its consequences are still being felt in Israeli society. While the Palestinian territory where the war was waged lies in ruins, for some of the Israelis who fought there the devastation that lingers is in the mind. 

In the weeks after Israel and Hamas agreed to an open-ended ceasefire, three Israeli soldiers decided to end their lives with their own weapons. And what was especially striking about their suicides was that all served in the same unit, the Givati Brigade, which had a reputation for its ruthless ferocity, considerable bravery, and the use of Old Testament religiosity to justify the merciless operations of its commander, Colonel Ofer Winter. 

The unit spent most of its time in Gaza close to the border with Israel in an area the Israel Defense Forces set out to make a wide buffer zone consuming more than 40 percent of Gaza’s territory. Fighters from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups did not fall back. Instead they operated out of a vast network of tunnels, and the combat was as ferocious as any the IDF has seen for many years. But the Givati Brigade drew particular attention because of its alleged responsibility for widespread civilian casualties. 

On July 21, the Givati was the main infantry force in the assault on Khuzaa, a town in south-central Gaza right on the border with Israel. Human Rights Watchreported afterward, without specifying the unit, that IDF troops there were responsible for “repeated shelling that struck apparent civilian structures, lack of access to necessary medical care, and the threat of attack from Israeli forces as [civilians] tried to leave the area.” 

Humanitarian organizations were denied entry to Khuzaa, leaving medics unable to tend the wounded or collect corpses. Residents fortunate enough to have escaped began returning to the destroyed village at the beginning of August. 

On Aug. 1, The Daily Beast reported what appeared to have been a summary execution of six men inside an abandoned home full of IDF bullet casings. 

In a follow-up report, an Islamic Jihad member under the alias Abu Muhammad, who claimed to have fought in the battle of Khuzaa, alleged that the Palestinians killed were members of his organization, that they had come out of a tunnel to try to ambush IDF soldiers but had been ambushed themselves, were cornered in a nearby house, ran out of ammunition, and then were executed. 

He claims that during an early morning operation in Khuzaa, God sent “clouds of glory” to protect his troops. 

When asked about the event, and about the possibility that the three soldiers who committed suicide might have been involved, an IDF spokesperson declined to comment and said the matter was still under investigation. 

By the time villagers returned to the ruins of Khuzaa in early August, the Givatis had moved south. Second Lieutenant Hadar Goldin of the Givati Brigade was believed to have been captured by Hamas fighters during a battle in Rafah on Aug. 1. 

In response, the IDF appears to have initiated what is known as the Hannibal Directive or Protocol, a procedure that aims to free a captured soldier—or risk ending his life along with that of his abductors, if that’s what it takes—in order to avoid protracted negotiations with militants that may free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The directive dates back to 1986, was kept secret and reportedly was abolished. But on Aug. 3, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Hannibal Directive was still very much in effect: 

“On Friday morning, when the IDF still believed that Lt. Hadar Goldin may have been taken alive by Hamas into an attack tunnel beneath Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, the Hannibal Directive was activated to its most devastating extent yet—including massive artillery bombardments and airstrikes on possible escape routes. At least 40 Palestinians were killed in Rafah.” 

The Right Kind of German Leadership for Europe

by: JAN TECHAU

OCTOBER 28, 2014

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German leadership has become the Holy Grail of European politics. There is not a single policy debate on EU affairs—be it about the euro, political union, a possible British exit from the EU, trade, or foreign policy—that does not end up being a discussion of what Berlin wants, should want, can do, and can’t do. All solutions (and all problems, for that matter) seem to stem from German leadership—or a lack thereof.

But what is the right kind of German leadership in and for Europe?

Successful German leadership in Europe has traditionally rested on three pillars. Let’s call them the Kohlian trinity, after former chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The first pillar was a rock-solid idea of what the European Union should be. Almost all members of the German political elite subscribed to the same vision of Europe: if in doubt, favor integration. This did not necessarily mean embracing the EU’s founding principle of “ever closer union,” but it was essentially a feeling that more Europe was a good idea.

This notion was not a lofty, postmodern, federalist pipe dream. It was very sensible politics that served German interests and the country’s domestic zeitgeist well. It was also about a clear Ordnungsmodell: a rules-based system of conflict resolution that would make all EU members more affluent and more secure in return for partly surrendering national sovereignty.

The second pillar of German leadership was the willingness of all postwar German governments to give in just a little bit earlier and pay just a little bit more than other countries to forge compromise. Germany became a modern-day honest broker and reserve power of European affairs.

Being willing to give more than others to hold the EU together and to deepen integration was strongly in Germany’s national interest. The country had most to gain from a functioning Europe. Not only did a well-oiled EU make the Germans immensely rich and turn former enemies into friends; it also enabled Germans to live at peace with themselves, a motivation that was (and still is) hugely underestimated by others when they assess German foreign policy.

The third pillar of the Kohlian trinity was a painstaking effort to attend to the fears, worries, and concerns of Germany’s neighbors. Kohl’s mastery came from the fact that he wasn’t only interested in the big players like France, Britain, or Italy. That went without saying.

He was also particularly concerned about the smaller countries. He put an enormous effort into cultivating trusted relationships with the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, and also, crucially, with Spain. Kohl knew that these states all had barely concealed nightmares about German size and dominance, and about their dependence on Germany’s economy. So he made a point of visiting them disproportionately often and being their advocate, whenever possible, inside the EU.

Germany’s extraordinary investment in these smaller players (a feat that consecutive French governments were unable to pull off) served a dual purpose. The move created the trust that Germany’s neighbors needed and that the Germans themselves required to come to terms with their place in Europe. And the effort was eminently smart power politics in terms of organizing majorities in the EU institutions.

Today, Germany’s dilemma is twofold. First, the three Kohlian pillars of leadership are still required, but they are only partly intact at best. Second, even if they were fully functioning, they would no longer be sufficient.

#Germany needs to redevelop a clear idea of where it wants Europe to go.

The World’s Future: Bipolar Geoeconomics?

by: DMITRI TRENIN

OCTOBER 28, 2014

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At an event in Beijing last week, a leading Chinese academic said that the vision of a multipolar world so central to Beijing's foreign policy doctrine was in fact unrealistic—for the lack, now and in the foreseeable future, of multiple poles. In fact, he said, there were only two poles available: the United States and China. All other countries would need to decide with which they want or have to align. Many in the audience nodded and some even suggested that the Chinese leadership's thinking was much closer to that of the professor than to its own formal doctrine.

Political developments of the past nine months seem to have produced a lot of fresh evidence in support of the growing global bipolarity. The Ukraine crisis has put an end to Russia's hopes of building a Greater Europe or of a strategic partnership with Japan. The European Union has had to reduce and restrict its economic ties with Russia, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan has had to abandon his idea of forging a strategic connection to Moscow. In their opposition to Russia's policies, both Europe and Japan are now more closely tied to the United States than ever before since the end of the Cold War. Faced with the Western sanctions, Russia, for its part, has had to intensify and expand its relations with China. As the Beijing academic put it, it simply has no other choice.

Several fundamental geoeconomic trends point in the same direction. As Konstantin Simonov put it in his October 21column in Vedomosti newspaper, the re-industrialization of the United States powered by cheap energy and helped by raising labor costs in Asia leads to the emergence of a pan-American economic space, from Canada to Chile, with the United States at its center. Europe, Japan and Australia are already aligning themselves with the U.S. through Transatlantic and Transpacific partnerships. In response, China is already working on expanding its own domestic consumption and consolidating its ties with neighboring countries in Asia.

President Xi Jingpin's initiatives, announced in 2013, about the Silk Road Economic Belt in continental Asia and the Maritime Silk Road point to the two main axes of China's geoeconomic expansion. Beijing eyes Central and South-East Asia as prime areas for boosting trade and investment. South Asia and Eurasia are next. If these plans are implemented, the future economic Sinosphere, which might be more politely called Greater Asia, may extend all the way to the Gulf, the Black Sea and the Baltics, and embrace countries such as India, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia.

Regionalization may indeed be the future or at least the new stage of globalization. Competition among the super-regions, in this scenario, will become the essence of global geoeconomics and geopolitics. Unlike in the early stages of globalization, the main players' norms and principles, the values and ideas will be actively contested. It is not a given that this contest will always be peaceful. Geoeconomics, by itself, will not just build a new and stable world order. Again, as the developments of the past nine months have shown, geopolitics is not far behind, and can throw a wrench into the process, particularly when it is ignored. A world of roughly equal multiple poles is not in the offing. But do not bank on a Sino-American bi-hegemony, either. It is going to be messier, but also more diverse and more interesting than that.

SOCOM Wants To Start Data Mining the Open Web

By PAUL McLEARY 

Oct. 25, 2014

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Eyes on the Threat: A US Air Force tactical air control party member (left) observes the compass and the area while an Air Force combat controller talks on the radio during Emerald Warrior 2014 on Hurlburt Field, Florida, May 1. A new US Special Operations Command program would use online information to give operators on the ground a better view of nearby threats. (Senior Airman Colville McFee/ / 3rd Combat Camera)

WASHINGTON — US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is building an open-source data-mining program that will run automatic keyword searches across a variety of websites and databases, allowing its operators to build a better picture of their operating environment in as close to real time as possible.

The command held a series of meetings with a group of defense industry representatives in late June to discover what commercial tech might be available in the near future, according to a SOCOM official.

Dubbed AVATAR — “Automated Visualization for Tailored Analytical Reporting” — the program would be run by existing SOCOM staffers at the “tactical, strategic and operational levels” of action, according to command spokesman US Navy Capt. Kevin Aandahl.

The objective, Aandahl said, is to “filter and display open-source information in a way that is specific and timely to the needs and requirements of the SOF [special operations forces].”

A request for information released in May stated that the program would comprise functional areas: “data acquisition, data mining and analysis, visualization and reporting, and alerts and monitoring.”

SOCOM is also looking for contractors to provide the ability to “perform high-volume queries quickly and conduct searches on pre-determined websites.”

The data-mining software, the May solicitation said, would “automatically extract information of interest from all types of structured, unstructured, and multimedia data,” then perform link analysis and correlate that information with intelligence that has already been provided by the big US intelligence agencies.

The national security strategy outlined by the White House in 2012 places a premium on the use of special operations forces to operate — quietly — with allies on train and assist missions while continuing their counterterror mission wherever Washington deems fit.

But that doesn’t always mean that specific missions will be given a high priority by the big intelligence agencies.

When operators go to perform a small mission, they have to tailor their intelligence packages for the geographic area, and “that’s something that’s hard to get from one of the big intel agencies on short notice, because those agencies are worried about those top-level national priorities,” said Jim Penrose, a former National Security Agency intelligence officer.

It's Time to Wake Up: Chinese Hacking Is Eroding U.S. Military Superiority

By Mackenzie Eaglen & Charles Morrison

October 21, 2014

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Countering Chinese cyber espionage must be a top priority

Earlier this month, the latest cyber-attack against J.P. Morgan garnered national headlines. And most Americans are aware of – if not affected by – last year’s Target and this year’s Home Depot data breaches.

Yet many Americans know much less about the regular and sophisticated theft of many of the U.S. military’s cutting-edge weapons systems. The cybercrime has reached the point where the FBI has warned American companies about a group of sophisticated Chinese government-backed hackers that has been working for years to steal economic and national security secrets from the U.S. government and private contractors. The notice comes after the Justice Department indicted five People’s Liberation Army officials in May for commercial espionage.

Systematic Chinese cyber espionage has resulted in significant damage to U.S. national security. However, Congress seems to be doing little to help. Part of it can surely be chalked up to what has been called “data breach fatigue.” Presumably the same mindset has infected the nation’s capital.

But the Pentagon cares about these breaches, and Congress should start paying serious attention. Last year, the Washington Post reported on a classified Defense Department report that revealed Chinese hackers have compromised the designs of more than two dozen U.S. military weapons systems. The list of impacted programs reads like a catalogue of weapons critical to current U.S. military dominance, including the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the Patriot missile system, the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system, the Navy’s Aegis ballistic missile-defense program, the V-22 Osprey, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and the Littoral Combat Ship. The Washington Free Beacon reports that other data stolen by the Chinese include the P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft and RQ-4 Global Hawk drones.

As the Chinese continue their military modernization while undermining America’s, Pentagon officials have increasingly sounded the alarm that U.S. military technological superiority is at risk. This technological superiority, in the words of Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Frank Kendall, “is being challenged in ways that I have not seen for decades, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Technological superiority is not assured and we cannot be complacent about our posture. This is not a future problem. It is a ‘here-now’ problem.”

Many Pentagon leaders have looked to “leap-ahead” technologies to address this growing problem, investing in “seed corn” that will eventually sprout into game-changing technologies and capabilities. Yet, alarmingly, the Chinese have also compromised many of the next-generation technologies that the U.S. military is relying upon to maintain a leg-up in its competition with China. According to the Free Beacon, compromised technologies include “know-how related to directed energy weapons, drone video systems, technical data links, satellite communications, electronic warfare systems, and electromagnetic aircraft launch systems.”

Nations everywhere are exploiting the lack of cybersecurity

By Joel Brenner 

October 24, 2014

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Joel Brenner, a Washington lawyer and fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, is a former inspector general and senior counsel of the National Security Agency. 

U.S. military and security officials can blow things up with a keyboard and a mouse. They’ve done it. Some even say they were behind the Stuxnet cyberattack that destroyed thousands of centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility. Likewise, two years ago, an attack originating in Iran ruined 30,000 computers at the Saudi Aramco oil giant, and the Iranians are not as good at this kind of warfare as the Russians and Chinese. The message is clear: Weapons, along with espionage tools, can now be expressed in ones and zeros. When a device is connected to an electronic network, it can be disabled or destroyed through commands issued on that network. This applies to missile launchers, railway switches, manufacturing tools and any other machine. If you can penetrate a network remotely to suck data out of it, you can penetrate it to corrupt it or shut it down. Information security, which is the protection of data, has converged with operational security, which is making sure things work.

Companies cannot adequately protect their own networks, and neither can the government. The Internet was not built for security, yet we have made it the backbone of virtually all private-sector and government operations, as well as personal communications. Pervasive connectivity has brought dramatic gains in productivity and pleasure but has created equally dramatic vulnerabilities. Huge heists of personal information are common, and cybertheft of intellectual property and infrastructure penetrations continue at a frightening pace.

Chinese penetrations of networks at the U.S. military’s Transportation Command have been widely reported, for example, and every expert I know believes our electricity grid has been penetrated by Russia and China. Our military correctly assumes these penetrations would enable future attacks and disruptions. This is why the Pentagon announced this week that it’s pushing the construction of its own power grids at bases around the country. It knows that in times of conflict and stress, faith in the grid would be misplaced.

Cyberwarfare is not a sci-fi figment of fevered brains. It is already a feature of military operations, as we saw during the Gulf War in 1991 and in Russian operations against Estonia and Georgia. So long as the United States remains overwhelmingly powerful militarily, however, the risks of attempting a strategic cyber-strike against the United States would be enormous. Not only would the consequences of such strikes be difficult to predict and contain; they would also carry the likelihood of retaliation in conventional military terms. 

New cyber doctrine shows more offense, transparency

By Sean Lyngaas 

Oct 24, 2014 

The Pentagon this week published a doctrine that was unusually candid about offensive scenarios in cyberspace, a transparency that experts say could lead to an open and perhaps overdue policy debate. 

The document, released internally by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 2013 and publicly on Oct. 21, argues that the "growing reliance on cyberspace around the globe requires carefully controlling OCO [offensive cyber operations], requiring national level approval. This requires commanders to remain cognizant of changes in national cyberspace policy and potential impacts on operational authorities." 

The document also clearly defines offensive cyber operations as those "intended to project power by the application of force in and through cyberspace." The document is a reference point for top brass in planning cyber operations, not something that the budding force of thousands of military cyber specialists will draw on in day-to-day work, if ever. 

Jay Healey, director of the Atlantic Council's Cyber Statecraft Initiative, said the document was a welcome departure from past military practice of over-classifying discussions of strategy. 

"Just think of ... the problems of classification over the last 10 years. By completely classifying 'China' and what was going on, treating it like it was a huge counterintelligence secret, it delayed us from trying to react to Chinese espionage, in ways, for decades," he said. 

Healey, a former member of a cyber war-fighting unit in the Air Force, hopes that making the document public will open up debate among experts and officials on U.S. military goals for cyberspace. Physical conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan came with at least some debate of strategy, he said, so why not the same for cyberspace? 

Robert M. Lee, a digital forensic specialist and Ph.D. candidate at King's College London, agreed that in a military often hampered by over-classification, "to get to the point where we can declassify some of this is a big step" that will prompt debate among experts in and out of government. 

The newly released doctrine, banally named Joint Publication 3-12 (R), builds on a 2006 document known as the National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations (NMS-CO), which then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace described as the armed forces' "comprehensive strategic approach for using cyberspace to assure U.S. military strategic superiority in the domain." 

The NMS-CO touched on cyber offense, but another key document, DOD's Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace (SOC), published in July 2011, made no mention of it at all. The day the Pentagon unveiled that strategy, Gen. James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the U.S. approach to cyberspace was "too predictable" and lamented the lack of an offensive strategy.

Masters of the Battlefield: The Five Greatest U.S. Generals in History

Michael Peck

October 24, 2014 

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These masterful men charged the ranks of mediocrity.

What makes a great general? Napoleon, who knew a thing or two about generalship, said he would rather have a lucky general than a good one. Yet he didn't mean a commander who blithely staked the fortunes of war on a roll of the dice, as if combat were a spin at the Vegas roulette wheel. A lucky general was one with a cool head who could take advantage of opportunities.

Some qualities seem universal: perseverance, shrewdness and keeping cool during a crisis. Others are debatable: Some would say a professional military education from institutions such as West Point is a necessity, while Vo Nguyen Giap, the schoolteacher who became the general that defeated professional French and American commanders, might disagree.

Either way, in its nearly 250-year history, America has produced some very good and very bad generals. Each was great in his own way, in the circumstances of his time and in the qualities that America needed.

But greatness they earned, and here are five of the best:

George Washington:

It was Washington's misfortune to end up on the $1 bill. The portrait of what appears to be an effete old man in a wig has caused future generations of Americans to underestimate him.

In reality, he was a physically tough and mentally ruthless commander. He had to be. His successors, like Grant or Eisenhower, might have lost a war for the United States. For Washington, defeat of the American Revolution meant losing the only war that mattered.

Many doubted he could succeed. How could a bunch of ragged, poorly supplied and untrained colonists beat an army of formidable British redcoats backed by the power of the Royal Navy? But he did succeed, aided by British strategic miscalculations, French logistical and military aid, and the sheer enormity of Britain trying to control an area the size of the eastern United States with an 18th-century army.

Washington may not have been a great battle captain of Napoleonic caliber, as evidenced by his disastrous New York campaign of 1776. Yet by Bonaparte's standards, he could be considered lucky, as when he exploited British mistakes to win the Battle of Trenton and restore flagging American morale.

However, his real genius was strategic insight. He simply realized that as long as he kept the Continental Army intact and able to strike, the British could never consolidate control of their former colonies. He didn't need to destroy the British armies; just occupying their attention while American militia and guerrillas harassed British troops and eliminated Loyalist strongholds would be enough to sustain the Revolution and wear down London's resolve.

Winfield Scott:

Since 1943, America has become accustomed to launching amphibious assaults of overwhelming strength. D-Day and Tarawa were tough battles, but at least the attackers were backed by massive resources.

When Scott landed at Vera Cruz, Mexico in March 1847, he was conducting the largest American amphibious assault until World War II. But where Eisenhower at Normandy could land 150,000 men backed by enormous naval and air support, Scott had just 10,000 men.

Stopping a Nuclear Nightmare: How We Can Secure Loose Nuclear Materials

Kenneth N. Luongo

October 24, 2014 

"Since the collapse of communism, there have been 664 reported incidents involving the theft or loss of nuclear and other radioactive materials..."

The faltering international response to the Ebola epidemic and the rise of ISIS in the Middle East starkly highlight the need for a modernized global architecture that can effectively address rapidly mutating challenges to the world order. In response to the recent cascade of global instability, President Obama acknowledged that, “to keep pace with an interconnected world . . . we cannot rely on a rule book written for a different century.” He should heed his own advice. The international forum he created to strengthen the security of vulnerable nuclear materials and facilities is heading into its endgame, still relying on twentieth-century rules that leave glaring gaps unaddressed.

The United States will host the fourth and likely final Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in 2016, and later this month, representatives from over fifty nations will start planning the agenda. They need to overcome the prevailing complacency about the strength of the current security system and its ability to prevent a nuclear nightmare.

The current system suffers from three fundamental weaknesses. It mostly relies on voluntary obligations that nations can take or leave. There are no mandatory international standards that would allow for effective evaluation of security consistency and competency across borders. And, there is no requirement for peer review or even communication among countries about their security strategy and practices. The result is an opaque global patchwork, with the weakest links offering tempting targets for increasingly emboldened terrorists.

U.S. leadership is essential for addressing these problems. The three previous gatherings have yielded important results, in particular the accelerated removal of bomb-grade materials from a variety of countries. But many of the accomplishments plucked low-hanging fruit.

The threat is not remote. In July 2012, three peace activists, including an eighty-two-year-old nun, penetrated multiple security layers at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear facility and spray painted peace slogans on the wall of a building holding weapons-grade uranium. In 2013, a small radioactive device suitable for use as a “dirty bomb” that spews radioactive contamination wasstolen from an unarmed truck at a gas station in Mexico. Since the collapse of communism, there have been 664 reported incidents involving the theft or loss of nuclear and other radioactive materials, of which sixteen involved the possession of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Al Qaeda for years has made clear its desire to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Recognizing that the clock is running out on the high-level summit process, there are five priorities that need to be achieved at the 2016 summit.

More Small Wars Counterinsurgency Is Here to Stay

By Max Boot 

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE

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Although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are far from the costliest the United States has ever fought in terms of either blood or treasure, they have exacted a much greater toll than the relatively bloodless wars Americans had gotten used to fighting in the 1990s. As of this writing, 2,344 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan and 4,486 in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured. The financial costs reach into the trillions of dollars.

Yet despite this investment, the returns look meager. Sunni extremists from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), also known as the Islamic State, and Shiite extremists beholden to Iran have divided the non-Kurdish parts of Iraq between them. Meanwhile, the Taliban and the Haqqani network remain on the offensive in Afghanistan. Given how poorly things have turned out, it would be tempting to conclude that the United States should simply swear off such irregular conflicts for good.

If only a nation as powerful and vulnerable as the United States had the option of defining exactly which types of wars it wages. Reality, alas, seldom cooperates. Over the centuries, U.S. presidents of all political persuasions have found it necessary to send troops to fight adversaries ranging from the Barbary pirates to Filipino insurrectos to Haitian cacos to Vietnamese communists to Somali warlords to Serbian death squads to Taliban guerrillas to al Qaeda terrorists. Unlike traditional armies, these enemies seldom met U.S. forces in the open, which meant that they could not be defeated quickly. To beat such shadowy foes, American troops had to undertake the time-intensive, difficult work of what’s now known as counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and nation building.

Getting America's Global Military Footprint Right

James Jay Carafano

October 25, 2014 

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"Americans don't want the world's cheapest military. They want a military that can defend their interests and deliver a dollar of capability for a dollar invested." 

Over the last quarter century, Washington's primary tool for divesting infrastructure the armed forces no longer needs has been the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. But the Pentagon needs better tools if it is to manage its massive global footprint efficiently.

Throughout this summer of serial chaos, American interests have suffered setbacks on every critical front from Asia to the Middle East. The silver lining is that these harrowing challenges have helped most members of Congress see that it makes no sense to take a "peace dividend" when there is no peace. As a result, lawmakers in 2016 are likely to abandon the current cycle of ever-constricting defense budgets, which has demonstrably cut the capacity and capability of our armed forces.

That said, it is unlikely that defense budgets will rise quickly and sharply. To recover from the damage done and provide the force needed to handle the missions likely to be given them, the Pentagon will have to look hard for ways to get more bang for its buck. Managing the military's global infrastructure must be part of the mix.

The Pentagon's 200+ golf courses are only a tiny fraction of the 29 million acres of land and hundreds of thousands of buildings managed by the Department of Defense (DOD). In addition to facilities in the United States, the armed forces have a global footprint to get troops where they need to be to safeguard the nation's interests. For example, DOD maintains more than eighty installations and bases in Japan and more than one hundred in Italy.

Global companies, like DHL, with corporate facilities in hundreds of countries and territories, recognize that managing infrastructure is a core competency for ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations. They fret constantly over the state of their global footprint. DOD should do no less.

This is no revolutionary concept. The DOD has been trying to shed infrastructure since the end of the Second World War. McNamara's "whiz kids" made it a priority when they ran the Pentagon. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there have been five rounds of BRAC. In 1988, DOD shuttered sixteen major bases. In 1991, twenty-six got the axe. In 1993, the Pentagon ordered twenty-nine major closures. In 1995, twenty-seven more went by the wayside. In 2005, thirty-three additional bases got red-lined. At the same time, the armed forces realigned (moved facilities and personnel among) fifty-five other major bases and 234 minor facilities.

Overseas, the U.S. military presence has also shifted dramatically. Today, around 67,000 military personnel serve in twenty-eight main operating bases in Europe. That's a fraction of the footprint that was in place during the Cold War. The presence in South Korea is also smaller. On the other hand, the buildup of the U.S. military base on Guam is dramatic. The U.S. infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan swelled after 9/11. Both have been massively scaled back.

It has never been easy to match footprints to needs. America's global commitments keep evolving. Military budgets have waxed and waned. Technology and logistics and business practices change. The needs of the different services have to be taken into account. And politics—both at home and overseas—always matter.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command Counter-Unconventional Warfare White Paper

October 13, 2014

Counter-Unconventional Warfare White Paper 

During the last decade, the U.S. military, along with its interagency and international partners, has generated significant capability to counter the irregular threats presented by non-state terrorists, insurgents, and criminal groups. During these same years, a distinct challenge to America and its partners in NATO and beyond has arisen through an innovative mix of such irregular threats. This challenge is Hybrid Warfare combining conventional, irregular, and asymmetric means, to include the persistent manipulation of political and ideological conflict. Foreshadowed by Iranian actions throughout the Middle East and by Chinese “unrestricted warfare” strategists in the 1990s, Hybrid Warfare has now reached its most brazen form in Russia’s support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine.

Hybrid Warfare involves a state or state-like actor’s use of all available diplomatic, informational, military, and economic means to destabilize an adversary. Whole-of-government by nature, Hybrid Warfare as seen in the Russian and Iranian cases places a particular premium on unconventional warfare (UW). As such, a response capitalizing on America’s own irregular and unconventional warfare skills, as part of a whole-of-government and multinational strategy, can best counter actions of emergent adversaries to destabilize global security. Counter-Unconventional Warfare (C-UW) should thus prove central to U.S./NATO security policy and practice over the next several decades.

The Geopolitical Context: From Resurgent UW to Counter-UW

C-UW is a relatively new term coined by veterans of global special operations, who have combined a keen grasp of emerging challenges to international security with lessons learned from our struggle against violent extremism from rising states and non-state actors. C-UW begins with an understanding of unconventional warfare (UW) itself, defined in Joint doctrine as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” Central to Irregular Warfare (IW), UW involves external parties aiding indigenous actors against governments. Such aid can involve training, organizing, recruiting, operational advising, coordinated diplomatic support, and even use of kinetic action and logistical support to increase the advantage of indigenous insurgents or rebels.

Over the past decade, both states and non-state actors in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Georgia, and other areas have conducted this kind of UW to coerce, disrupt, and overthrow established governments. Novel forms of UW persist even to the present moment. Among non-state actors, Sunni Jihadi extremists claiming a boundless “Islamic State” now seek to overthrow national governments, local administrations, and social-political structures in a wide swathe from eastern Syria to northwestern Iraq, replacing them with a Muslim Caliphate across the region.

Commentary: Building Army Forces for Future War

 By retired Col. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR 

Oct. 13, 2014

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Twenty-threeyears after the first Gulf War, America’s post-Cold War surplus of military power is gone. We’ve squandered it in a series of open-ended conflicts inside the ungovernable wastelands of the Middle East and Southwest Asia against tribal peoples without armies, air forces or air defenses.

It’s the kind of warfare that rewards the tactical application of overwhelming firepower at the expense of coherent operations and strategy. Americans don’t want or need a repeat performance. The task now is to build US Army maneuver forces to fight and win in a future war of decision.

Wars of decision are interstate conflicts involving vital strategic interests that affect the survival of the republic. Wars of decision are infrequent, normally 50-100 years apart, but Americans cannot afford to lose a war of decision.

Unlike the conflicts since 1945, wars of decision change borders, reshape societies and alter the international system. Eastern Ukraine, northeast Asia, the western Pacific and Mesopotamia are places where wars of decision gestated in the past. Future victory depends on the willingness of the Army’s senior leaders to subject today’s Army to an extreme makeover without bias; one that is aligned with the demands of 21st century lethality, scalability, agility and economy.

Now is not the time to fight inside simulated battlespaces more than two decades into the future where capabilities are crafted into logarithms that preordain the outcome in favor of a retrofitted Cold War Army with modest changes on the margin.

Innovation is critical, but as Steve Jobs asserted, people, not institutions, innovate: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many research and development (R&D) dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

“Getting it” means understanding that wars of decision are decided in the decades before they begin when strategic self-awareness, an authentic, unbiased appraisal of one’s own capabilities and constraints, guides force development.

■ In both world wars, Americans were lucky that other great powers fought for years before our entry, giving the US armed forces, and the US Army in particular, time to build up fighting power.

In the 21st century, we are unlikely to be so lucky. Given American resistance to a draft, future Army combat forces must be professional fighting forces-in-being; i.e., ready, standing forces that are not dependent on mobilization. These forces must be trained and equipped to fight, not to conduct nation building.

■ Twenty-first century operations that depend exclusively on salvos of precision-guided weapons will decide little of strategic importance on land. If Army maneuver forces are tightly integrated with joint ISR and strike capabilities, fewer, smarter, highly trained professional soldiers inside the right organization for combat can accomplish much more than the mass armies of the past. To do so, Army maneuver forces must be organized as self-contained, stand-alone formations that can operate with ease inside a joint, integrated military command structure.

Fire When Ready Flamethrowers were horrific … and effective

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Between July and November of 1917, one of the greatest disasters of the Great War unfolded near the Belgian town of Ypres, where the British and their allies fought the Germans for control of some ridges running through Flanders.

Better known as the Battle of Passchendaele, hundreds of thousands of men occupied trenches, dugouts and underground tunnels on the front lines. Among the British forces there were many seasoned infantrymen who could claim to have seen all the technological terrors so far gathered together on World War I battlefields—machine gun fire, poison gas, strafing and bombing by aircraft.

But for many soldiers, they would face a weapon for the first time that the Germans had introduced just two years before. The Flammenwerfer—or, in English, the flamethrower.

The results were horrifying. Carried by specially trained assault teams, German flamethrowers were highly effective weapons that would either drive men from their defensive positions … or simply incinerate them.

“When the nozzles were lighted, they threw out a roaring, hissing flame 20 or 30 feet long, swelling at the end to an oily rose, six feet in diameter,” Guy Chapman, a British infantryman at Passchendale, recalled years later in an account about one such assault. “Under the protection of these hideous weapons the enemy surrounded the advance pillbox, stormed it and killed the garrison.”

Fire on the battlefield is nothing new. Fifth-century Greeks during the Peloponnesian War developed a bellows-powered device that squirted flaming liquid at an enemy. Medieval sieges almost always included hurling “fire pots” over the walls of fortified towns or castles in an effort to start a conflagration. The order “set fire the village” is as old as military history.

Germans soldiers with flamethrowers in World War I. German government archive photo

But during the 20th century, engineers and scientists placed flames under advanced technological control in an effort to make fire-spouting weapons portable, reliable and reasonably safe—a different kind of “friendly fire” that would not kill the operator while he was doing his best to kill the enemy with a weaponized inferno.

The result is a device with as much psychological impact as lethality—perhaps the chief reason why United States, Great Britain and other world powers used the flamethrower from World War I through the Vietnam War. Even today, Russia still has flamethrowers in its inventory.

“The most dramatic hand weapon of World War II and the most effective for its purpose was the flamethrower,” Edwin Tunis wrote in Weapons: A Pictorial History, his classic compilation of weapons through the ages. “It is hoped that it is less frightfully inhuman than it seems.”

In 1901, German inventor Richard Fiedler developed the firstFlammenwerfer. He worked steadily with others from 1908 to 1914, refining the weapon’s design and creating two versions for battlefield use.

The Kleinflammenwerfer was a man-portable flamethrower consisting of a two-tank system, one holding flammable oil and the other a pressurized inert gas that sprayed the mixture out of the nozzle of a long wand.

The Grossflammenwerfer was a crew-served weapon with large tanks mounted on a cart or a litter. It shot flames farther and for a longer time.

Melting glaciers, changing climate

Published: October 29, 2014

Meena Menon

The HinduSCALING NEW HEIGHTS: Glaciology is not for the faint-hearted. Picture shows Mohd Soheb, a glaciology researcher, checking the precipitation gauge at the JNU base camp .Photo: By Special Arrangement

Though studies point to an increase in the pace of glacier wastage in the western Himalayas, long-term monitoring is required to study glacier evolution and its relation to the climate

At dawn, Mohd Soheb begins an arduous trek to the high camp at Chhota Shigri glacier in the Pir Panjal range in Spiti valley, Himachal Pradesh. From the PWD guesthouse at Chota Dara, he walks down to the Chandra river where he travels across in a small iron crate using an ingenious system of pulleys to the base camp at about 3,850 metres set up by the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) School of Environmental Sciences.

From the camp, the snout of the glacier located at about 4,050 metres, looks deceptively close but actually requires a two hour climb over moraine. Covered by a sheet of dirty ice, it is almost blocked by stones but has a clear stream flowing from it which meets the river downstream at Chota Dara. Soheb will go ahead to 4,800 metres, to the high camp from where he will be carrying out studies. Steam drills are carried all the way up to dig into the snow and ice to place bamboo stakes up to 10 metres deep for measuring melting at intervals after the snout of the glacier. About 100 km from Manali, the glacier is relatively accessible, but for students like Soheb doing his M.Phil in glacier studies, the hardest part is getting there. The five-hour drive from Manali over non-existent roads is bone crushing and then the climbing over moraine filled with giant boulders. What is more challenging is measuring the winter snow accumulation, also called winter balance, just when the snow starts melting in late May, Soheb says. Last year he, along with other researchers, walked 30 km to reach the glacier since the area was snowed under and the roads were not open.

Glaciology, therefore, is not for the faint-hearted. JNU solved the issue of trained human resources by launching a programme from 2013 under a Department of Science and Technology (DST)- Indo-Swiss capacity building programme for budding glaciologists, training nearly 30 persons for advanced research in Himalayan glaciology. Chhota Shigri is one of the earliest glaciers in the country to be studied since 1986 as part of the Himalayan Glaciology Research Programme by DST. This was discontinued in 1989.