Robert D. Kaplan hopes that the actions of one radicalized Muslim in the US military does not result in a backlash against all Muslims in the US military:

The ultimate strategic goal of al-Qaeda is to turn our struggle with it into a “clash of civilizations.” If potential Muslim recruits to the U.S. military quietly decide not to enlist for fear of retribution or prejudice inside the barracks, that would be a victory for al-Qaeda.

Still, trust but verify:

That’s why, while we improve our security procedures behind the scenes, we should deal with the massacre at Fort Hood in as low key a manner as possible. More Maj. Hasans may lurk in the barracks and public squares. The way to find them out is not in a shrill witch hunt, but quietly, methodically, and legally, even as we open up our military to a wider spectrum of recruits.

The last map showed America’s dominance in winning Nobel Prizes. Via Bill Petti on Twitter comes today’s map showing book bans and challenges by state in America over the past three years. Is your state on the list?

Some of the banned books include Grendel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, The Golden Compass and Hoops. According to the BBC bans on 3,736 books and other print materials have been requested since 2001. The most banned book is the one about the gay penguins.

I think it would be appropriate to quote one of America’s most famous pieces of literature:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Book banning is sad behaviour, and I am by no means saying it only happens in the US. freedomtoread.ca maintains a list of over 100 books and magazines that have been challenged in Canada over the decades. Wikipedia comes to the rescue with a massive list of books banned by governments from around the world. Is your country on it?

Luckily, no Robert Kaplan books are on any of the lists.

DoD Announces New Defense Policy Board Members:

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates today announced the following new members to the Defense Policy Board: Gen. (Ret) Larry Welch, former Air Force chief of staff ; Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations; Richard Danzig, former secretary of the Navy; Robert Gallucci, former assistant secretary of state; Chuck Hagel, former senator from Nebraska; Robert D. Kaplan, Center for a New American Security; Andrew Krepinevich, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; Rudy deLeon, former deputy secretary of defense; John Nagl, Center for a New American Security; Sarah Sewall, Harvard University; Wendy Sherman, former special advisor to the President.

These members join the following returning members: John Hamre, chairman; Harold Brown; Adm. (Ret) Vern Clark; J.D. Crouch; Fred Ikle; Gen. (Ret) Jack Keane; Henry Kissinger; Dave McCurdy; Frank Miller; William Perry; James Schlesinger; Marin Strmecki; Vin Weber; Gen. (Ret) Pete Pace.

Via SWJ via Simlaughter

Radical splinter groups self-financed with drugs and well armed. This may be a small foretaste of things to come in the next several decades.

The killings, last month, have terrified this small town near the Mexican border, in part because the authorities have now tied them to what they describe as a rogue group engaged in citizen border patrols.

The three people arrested in the crime include the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a Washington State-based offshoot of the Minutemen movement, in which citizens roam the border looking for people crossing into the country illegally. Former members describe the group’s leader, Shawna Forde, 41, as having anti-immigrant sentiments that are extreme, at times frightening, even to people accustomed to hard-line views on border policing.

The authorities say that the three suspects were after money and drugs that they intended to use to finance vigilantism, and that they have been linked to at least one other home invasion, in California.

Will we one day see cross-border raids by American militia groups into Mexico? If drug violence increases or some event acts as a catalyst increasing militia groups and bringing more mainstream Americans into it, there may one day be. As the economy continues to decline and federal and state services are cut, at times drastically, we can expect to see not just radical groups like those mentioned in the article, but local communities organizing their own security. It will likely start with those on the edges of bad neighborhoods, or in places where neighborhoods have been gutted by the housing crisis and are going downhill fast.

Readers, what indicators should we watch when considering whether such groups will remain on the fringes or begin to grow? Unemployment rates among young white males? Law enforcement funding? A perceived lack of immigration reform? Some terrorist attack or major event wherein the perpetrators are found to have crossed in in from Mexico illegally?

With arms control talks underway between the US and Russia, a Russia general noted

Russia must keep at least 1,500 nuclear warheads after talks with the United States on a new arms treaty, Interfax news agency quoted the commander of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces as saying Wednesday. If Moscow’s final position reflects Colonel-General Nikolai Solovtsov’s view, it would mean Russia is not willing to cut its stockpiles by more than a few hundred strategic warheads – far less than some arms control bodies had hoped.

One of the most critical things to pay attention to in news like this is whether they are discussing strategic or tactical nuclear weapons. The article does not make it clear but from what I know, I suspect he means strategic weapons, i.e. larger yield and long range ones. It would therefore not include the thousands of smaller tactical warheads Russia has and which it has refused to reduce or give up. Thus, be wary of any ‘progress’ or agreement that does not specifically mention both types.

Given Russia’s size and the threats it faces on its many borders, tactical weapons are of great use and importance to Moscow, whereas they are not for the United States which finds itself in a very different geographic and security situation. The real danger here is that the current administration, which seems intent on disarming the United States while EVERY other country is increasing its arsenal, will agree to cuts in our forces that do NOT include Russia’s tactical weapons being dismantled. Therefore, while you would read news articles on Russia’s and America’s numbers being about the same, they’d only be counting strategic forces and thus not actually revealing the much weaker and vulnerable position the US would have put itself in.

The WSJ has yet another sign of the dissolution of political units into ever smaller ones. As the economy worsens and states, cities, communities and families move to, or at least explore, becoming more independent, self-sufficient and resilient, we’ll see things like this happening more often.

As the recession batters city budgets around the U.S., some municipalities are considering the once-unthinkable option of dissolving themselves through “disincorporation.”

Benefits of this move vary from state to state. In some cases, dissolution allows residents to escape local taxes. In others, it saves the cost of local salaries and pensions. And residents may get services more cheaply after consolidating with a county.

In Mesa, Wash., a town of 500 residents about 250 miles east of Portland, Ore., city leaders have initiated talks with county officials about the potential regional impact of disincorporating. Mesa has been hit by a combination of the recession and lawsuits that threaten its depleted coffers, leaving few choices other than disincorporation, said Robert Koch, commissioner of Franklin County, where Mesa is located.

With this trend devolving power and responsibility to lower and lower levels, another interesting question to consider in the long term, is whether this will lead to the division of states. Consider northern Virginia (Fairfax County), Texas and California. Perhaps it will eventually lead to statehood in places like Washington, D.C. I discussed this awhile back here. Although the financial crisis may be the primary motivator for decisions at the moment, it seems to be only reinforcing an already growing trend.

Putting aside the absolute fantasy of a nuclear weapons free world, Obama is attempting to improve the US relationship with Russia. The major starting point is negotiating a new START (strategic arms reduction treaty) treaty with the Russians to reduce each country’s respective nuclear weapons. Yet, this blogger feels it runs contrary to the idea of an improved and friendlier relationship with Moscow. After all, how many arms control treaties does the United States have with its allies? Zero. My and others’ great fear is that the Obama administration will let arms control define the US-Russia relationship at a time when a far broader range of issues require attention. Continuing the Cold War era arms control treaties with Moscow continues to define the US-Russia relationship as adversarial, not cooperative. I understand proliferation and nuclear forces reduction are important issues and that since Russia currently possesses the most nuclear weapons in the world, it is a key issue with them. However, I feel this is the wrong way forward.

Readers, your thoughts?

After revealing some cloak and dagger tales of American covert ops in Iran in recent years, New York Times Washington bureau chief David Sanger asks a great question: Will President Obama stop covert ops in Iran? Or will the weight of history push him to continue Bush’s legacy?

Is “legacy” an important factor in the calculus of being the POTUS? People said Bush was particularly conscious of his legacy. Can anyone provide historical examples of presidents choosing legacy over national interest that will let us gauge what President Obama will do?

By the way, the clip resides on fora.tv, an online community that collects smart and provocative videos from across the interwebs for discussion and debate. It is a kind of an open source TED, or a thinking man’s YouTube. Check it out.

We somehow missed this Kaplan article from September, 2008, probably because it appeared in a very unusual forum, the progressive Mother Jones.

Mission Creep Dispatch: Robert Kaplan

As part of our special investigation “Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide,” we asked a host of military thinkers to contribute their two cents on topics relating to global Pentagon strategy… The following dispatch comes from Robert D. Kaplan.

In Defense of the Pentagon’s Small, Small World

It is important to realize that dozens of deployments simultaneously around the globe need not overstretch a military if those deployments are by and large small. But one big sustained deployment like Iraq can wreck the whole manpower system. It is also important to realize that all of these deployments are closely monitored by Congress. I was in Nepal in the middle of 2005, covering our military mission there, when its activities were halted for the time being by Washington because the king had suspended the political party process, in addition to other anti-democratic infractions. I was in Algeria the same year to witness the first US military mission there after that country had held free elections. Unlike during the Cold War, these missions for the most part are restricted to fledgling democratic countries.

Between risk-prone invasions like Iraq on one hand and isolationism on the other hand, there are these low-cost, low-risk, tediously unspectacular training missions and other small deployments. I have embedded on these missions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and have found them generally not bellicose, not utopian, not a distortion of our values, and the epitome of half-measures, full of compromises with the host nation, as well as replete with a recognition on a daily basis of our own limitations.

The problem, ironically, is that while small enough to avoid quagmires, they are big enough to get us into trouble sometimes. I was in Georgia in early 2006, embedded with the US Marine training mission of the Georgian army, and I intimated in print and on television in 2007 that we were dangerously close to interfering with a Russian-Georgian feud, even as our limited mission would not provide the Georgians with the means to affect the outcome. Our training mission was provocative to the Russians, but ineffectual in stopping their aggression.

But the fact that we get ourselves in trouble here and there does not mean the concept of small missions worldwide is wrong. It just means that we have to fully consider all the what-ifs of each one. It is these missions that provide the incentive for our troops to learn foreign languages and study local cultures. To wit, what’s the point of a French-language program at Fort Bragg if there are no training missions to former French colonial Africa? These missions, as I’ve witnessed, also pave the way for more adroit disaster-relief interventions like the one that followed the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004-2005. And because populations are growing in absolute terms in environmentally and seismically fragile zones, humanitarian intervention will be part of our military future. Keep these missions going, I say, but with strong civilian oversight.

The increasing likelihood that Iran will successfully acquire a nuclear weapon cannot be avoided. While this author does not predict with certainty that it will happen, nor believe the US and EU shouldn’t do everything in its power to stop it, it is a real possibility. Therefore, policy discussions should also begin to think about the potential implications of a nuclear Iran and consider how the US and others can mitigate the effects thereof.

North Korea has not yet set off a cascade of proliferation, largely because the potential new nuclear states are all US allies (South Korea, Japan, perhaps Taiwan). The same is not true of all the Middle East. In addition, states may react not only to Iran, but to their perceived reaction of others, i.e. Egypt reacting to Iran directly as well as to its belief Saudi Arabia will respond with its own program. Below is a regional map of what a nuclear Iran could lead to:

And to give readers something else to think about, the following countries are currently giving serious consideration to nuclear energy in the near term (within 10 years): Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Norway, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, Vietnam.

As if that were not troubling enough, the following countries have long term plans or studies underway: Algeria, Australia, Chile, Georgia, Ghana, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

This is not to say that all or even most will move forward. Nuclear energy (even for peaceful purposes) requires a massive financial investments in infrastructure, technology, training and more. Additionally, some states may decide against it at various states of their programs, as has happened many times in the past.

Therefore, in the event that Iran does indeed acquire a nuclear weapons capability, which we’ll define as the generally agreed perception that Iran does (whether or not it has tested), the United States and Europe need to think long and hard about instruments of state power which can be applied to prevent a cascade of nuclear weapons states and/or to ensure that peaceful nuclear energy (a legal right of every NPT signatory) stays peaceful and secure.