Israel Matzav

Fighting a war with one hand tied behind your back

The US war plan in Libya sounds like a disaster in the making. But given that the Turks have killed more people in Kurdistan than Gadhafi has killed in Libya anyway (yes, really) is it a war the US ought to be fighting?

The officers' biggest fear is of an overly loose, open-ended definition of the mission. For that reason it was decided at the outset that the command, and the headaches, would be handed off to someone else - presumably NATO, though that wasn't clear - within "days, not weeks."

NATO has no armed forces of its own. It has command headquarters that control the forces of member states. The commander of Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn, U.S. Navy Adm. Sam Locklear, is hosting on the command ship, the USS Mount Whitney, senior naval officers from participating countries.

Locklear is commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and Allied Joint Force Command, Naples. He is subordinate to Adm. James Stavridis, who is both Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commander of the U.S. European Command, and Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of the U.S. African Command.

Africom is a bluff. There is no command. It is a military-diplomatic organization, with an emphasis on development, consulting and economic cooperation, created at the end of the Bush era to signal an interest in Africa. Missions from other regional commands were expropriated to it and it was given the entire continent with the exception of Egypt, which remained in the Central Command. Israel, which from the U.S. perspective is in the European Command, participates in NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue, together with Central Command members Egypt and Jordan and Africom members Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Mauritania. Planning and operations cross three separate commands.

Africom has no forces, with the exception of the Horn of Africa. Its headquarters are in Stuttgart because no African capital was willing to host a U.S. military command - a synonym for occupation, aggression and foreign rule. by powers.

From the start, the U.S. army has treated the Libyan mission like a kind of hit-and-run accident: missile strikes against stationary ground-to-air and ground-to-ground missile batteries; an aerial strike on an armored vehicle; a gradual westward crawl along the coast, but not yet to Tripoli; limited air support for the rebels.

The weakness of the operational plan is completely the result of allowing Gadhafi to maintain the initiative. If he is crazy enough to take a pilot prisoner, to use chemical weapons or to dispatch terrorists to carry out attacks overseas, the mission will be expanded to include the targeted assassination of him and his family. But if he scales back his defense, that would take the wind out of the politicians' sails. Last week NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that Stavridis was deploying NATO ships and aircraft in the central Mediterranean, "to monitor, report and, if needed, interdict vessels suspected of carrying illegal arms or mercenaries" for Gadhafi's forces.

Half of Stavridis' authority comes from NATO, but the greater half is from Obama and from Gates, who before his retirement will advise Obama on his choice for the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Stavridis is a leading candidate. Like Gates, he has a university doctorate, as well as a Ph.D. in life sciences in political Washington. Gadhafi, if he acts in accordance with his own logic, not the logic attributed to him at the White House, will outlast them.

Read the whole thing.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Barack Obama, Libyan no-fly zone, NATO, Robert Gates

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:13 PM