Defense Spending 101: Part 3: Evaluating the Threat

As I said in my first post in this series, the analysis that should be used is to determine our vital national interests, determine the capabilities of those that threaten those interests, and then determine the appropriate force structure necessary to defeat, if necessary, these potential enemies.  In the last post, I focused on the determination of our vital national interests.  In this post, I will focus on the evaluation of the threat. Just as is the case with the determination of our national interest, disputes about the threat can drive very different views of the appropriate defense budget.

I will start with three observations.

First, not all of the areas of our vital national interest present threats that require the development of significant military options.  Since this Nation was founded, peace and stability in the Western Hemisphere has been a vital national interest.  Yet, with only a few exceptions quite early in our history, we have not faced significant threats to this interest.  This is why we did not build significant military capacity until we need to defend out interests elsewhere in the world. This remains true today.  While we continue to have an vital interests in the region, we really don't face significant threats.  The nations around us are either allies (Canada), non-threatening (most of Latin America) or too weak to be a threat (Cuba and Venezuela).  

Second, threats to our vital national interests can change over time.  Perhaps the best example is the fall of the Soviet Union.  As a result of the fall of the USSR and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the threat to peace and stability in Europe was dramatically reduced.  Russia no longer had the intention or ability to threaten Europe.  And as recent events in the Ukraine have shown, this is changing once again.  Russia has once again displayed aggressive intent--at least to non-NATO nations on its periphery and perhaps also to some former Warsaw Pact nations such as Latvia that do belong to NATO.  It has also made investments in military technology that make it more of a military threat to Europe.

Third, in evaluating the threats to our national security, we can't just focus on the threat today. Since we are making investment decisions for weapon systems that will be deployed twenty years from now, we also need to take into account threats to our interests that we will face over a much longer time horizon--20 to 30 years.  Here, China is a good example.  China is investing significantly in modern technology that could make it a true peer competitor in 20 years.  Accordingly, our evaluation needs to take into account the threat China presents to our interests 20 years from now, and not just now.

With this in mind, here are some cursory thoughts on the main threats that drive military spending:

Existential Threats:  As a country we are fortunate in not facing many threats to our very national survival.  Chinese aggression in Asia would be very bad for our future, but would not itself threaten our very survival.  We do, of course, face one significant existential threat: nuclear war.  At least for now, Russia (and perhaps China) are the only countries that present such a threat to the United States.  Fortunately, the nuclear balance, reflected in the  New Start limits on the Russian and American arsenals, have resulted in stability (based on deterrence).  North Korea's development on the capability to launch a nuclear-armed ICBM that could reach the U.S. is not an existential threat, but it is still an extremely significant threat nonetheless.

Russia: Russia's military modernization and recent aggression in both Georgia and Ukraine are troubling,and need to be taken into account as we size our force, but the threat still remains significantly below Cold War levels.  Nonetheless, our planning must include significant military assets to deter (and defeat, if deterrence fails) Russian aggression against NATO.

China: The biggest change to the threats we face concern China.  The change is two-fold.  First, China is making a massive investment in developing modern weapons that seek to match the U.S.  While the U.S. has traditionally had a large technological advantage over China, this advantage is rapidly going away.  Second, China is also becoming far more aggressive in asserting its power.  China has always asserted sovereignty over the South China Sea.  The change now is that it is now taking steps to enforce this view.  Both changes threaten the peace in the region and directly threaten several of our allies in the region.  It also threatens freedom of navigation in the region.

North Korea and Iran:  North Korea and Iran are regional powers that have significant military capacity that they have recently asserted in their regions.  Iran threatens navigation in the Arabian Gulf, and it is fighting proxy wars with several of our allies in the region. North Korea threatens South Korea and Japan, and is developing the capacity to strike the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. 

Terrorism:  Much of the focus of our national security policy in recent years has been on Middle East-based terrorism.  Given the metamorphic transformation of al Quida into several variants, the rise of ISIS, and the continued success of Taliban, this threat will likely remain well into the future.  As we will discuss in a later post, however, the current military-focused approach to the problem may no longer be the appropriate solution.

There is much to criticize with my analysis above.  Many analysts, for example, do not consider Iran a traditionally aggressive power, and view its aggressiveness in the region as reflecting a desire to protect minority Shi'a populations  in the region.  Others argue that Russia is merely asserting its power in the areas in which it has vital national interests (Eastern Europe) and that it is presenting little threat to core American interests.  I take a different view, but these kinds of disputes are not academic--they will determine whether we view Russia and Iran presenting a threat to vital national interests that merit a defense spending response.


Defense Spending 101, Part 1: Don't Get Distracted By the Wrong Numbers
Defense Spending 101, Part 2: Determining Our National Interests

Defense Spending 101, Part 4: Sizing the Force to Meet the Threat

Foreign Aid As a Tool For National Security

There are reports that President Trumps will propose a huge 37% cut to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development ("AID").   Understandably, much of the discussion about the cut in foreign aid has been on the devastating impact on the poorest of the poor.  Simply put, more people will starve; fewer of the poor will leave poverty, and more people will die of disease.  There is, however, another consequence of the proposed cut.  Using a very "America First" view of the matter, the cuts in foreign aid will make us less safe at home and less effective abroad.

Mona Yacoubian, a former AID official in the Middle East Bureau, explains, cuts in foreign aid will endanger the United States:

While the soft power aspect of U.S. development assistance is important, increasingly the work performed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and others must be recognized as a strategic asset that is no less powerful than the military in confronting multifaceted challenges, and for a fraction of the cost — less than one percent of the total federal budget. Indeed, in a letter to Congress last month, more than 120 retired military leaders underscored their “strong conviction that elevating and strengthening diplomacy and development are critical to keeping America safe.” Recognizing the complexity of crises in the 21st century world, they noted that these problems “do not have military solutions alone.” Nowhere is this more apparent than the Arab world, which suffers from the Islamic State’s barbaric extremism; wrenching conflicts in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; and massive refugee flows to Lebanon, Jordan, and beyond. Youth unemployment, poverty, corruption, and unaccountable governance add to the region’s volatility.

The U.S. military has spearheaded the counter-Islamic State campaign, but it is USAID, together with the U.N. and other international partners, that plays a key role in stabilizing areas liberated from the Islamic State. In his March 9 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Joseph Votel, Commander of U.S. Central Command, underscored that military might alone is not sufficient to defeat the Islamic State:

The military can help to create the necessary conditions; however, there must be concomitant progress in other complementary areas (e.g., reconstruction, humanitarian aid, stabilization, political reconciliation). There are a variety of interagency programs and efforts underway that are essential to translating military gains into actual achievement of stated goals and objectives. Support for these endeavors is vital to our success.

This is where USAID and its partners come in. Beyond providing critically needed humanitarian assistance and insuring access to essential services such as water, electricity, and health care, U.S. assistance helps strengthen local governance and ideally will facilitate the sustainable return of those who have been displaced from their homes. Successful stabilization of these areas will help prevent the emergence of dangerous power vacuums that can lead to renewed conflict, vastly diminishing the prospects that the United States will need to return to battle the Islamic State 2.0.

Read it all here.

Defense Spending 101: Part 2. Determining Our National Interests

In my last post, I discussed two ways not to talk about the appropriate level of defense spending.  Today, I want to discuss the analysis that I think should be used instead.  As I said in my first post in this series, the analysis that should be used is to determine our vital national interests, determine the capabilities of those that threaten those interests, and then determine the appropriate force structure necessary to defeat, if necessary, these potential enemies.  This post will focus on what may well be the most important part of the analysis: determining our vital national interests to which we will exert military power.

For most of our history, the United States had very few national interests to which it needed to assert military power outside of the Western Hemisphere.  This was because the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans acted as a barrier to any real threat from an aggressive power, and our other major national interests were largely taken care of by the United Kingdom.  For example, we had a vital national interest in freedom of navigation on the high seas, but the British Navy largely took care of that problem for us.  As a result of this narrow view of our national interests, our military was quite small over most of our history.  It was only when we began to build up our Navy in the late 19th Century that we were first capable of asserting power globally.  Even after World War I, our military forces were tiny, and with the exception of protecting the Philippines, Hawaii and other territories, we really had no interests that required the assertion of our military power globally.

World War II and the Cold War changed everything.  In the immediate aftermath of World War II, our allies like the United Kingdom were no longer capable of defending Western Europe, much less protecting freedom of navigation.  The United States decided the fill the vacuum, and as a result, we defined our interests globally.

The defense budget that we have now is based on the construct that our interests are global.  It assumes that we have vital national interests in peace and stability in Europe and Asia, in freedom of navigation worldwide, in access to important oil resources in the Middle East, and in the effective deterrence of  an attack within our borders.  With the rise of global terrorism, we also have an interest in defeating terrorist non-state actors before they can attack the United States, which has lead to the assertion of military power in Africa as well.  This view of our national interest is also embodied in our multinational alliance in Europe (NATO) and a series of bilateral alliances in Asia (with, among others, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines).

To a significant degree, our defense budgets have been driven by this transformation of the view we have of our national interest.  Of course, other factors to be discussed in later posts have also come into play (such as the end of the Cold War and the decline in Russian military power driving down defense spending), but the real driver has been our view of our national interest.

So the first critical decision is whether the post-World War II national defense establishment view of our national interest still makes sense.  Do we continue to have a vital national interest in peace and stability in Europe and Asia?  Given our reduced reliance on oil from the Middle East, does it remain a vital national interest.  And in both Europe and Asia, should we expect our allies to pick up more of the burden?  The decisions on each of these questions will dramatically affect defense spending.  For example, if we no longer have an interest in defending the Middle East, we could eliminate several expensive bases in the region and would no longer need to take possible aggressive action by Iran into account in sizing our force.

My own view is that while we should expect our European allies to assume more of the burden of defense, the current national interest construct largely gets it right.  The United States and the world have benefited greatly from this construct and the assertion of U.S. power based on this construct.  After centuries of conflict in both Asia and Europe, both regions have been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for the last 70 years.  This has greatly benefited both the average American and those who live in the region.  The low level of military spending by our allies (and most non-allies) in Asia and Europe reflects a decision that U.S. power has been a positive force in these regions.

While U.S. dependence on the Middle East is significantly less than in years past, this is not true of our allies--notably Japan.  Moreover, the Middle East is central to our fight against the non-state actors that threaten our country.  Finally, there are unique factors in Asia that merit caution before we disengage.  It is no accident that our alliances in Asia are all bilateral and not multi-national.  this is because our major Asian allies are deeply distrustful of each other.  To say that South Korea and Japan do not trust each other would be an understatement.  If we disengage in Asia, the resulting build-up by our allies could well cause conflict between them.

To be clear, we have made bone-headed decisions about the exercise of our power under this construct (our decision to get so deep in the Vietnam conflict and our decision to invade Iraq being the most obvious examples), but the broader decision about our national interests seems correct--at least to me.

Clearly, my view on the proper view of our national interest is subject to challenge.  The important point is that determining the proper construct is the critical first step to determining the size and shape of our defense budget.


Defense Spending 101, Part 1: Don't Get Distracted By the Wrong Numbers
Defense Spending 101, Part 3: Evaluating the Threat
Defense Spending 101, Part 4: Sizing the Force to Meet the Threat

Defense Spending 101, Part 1: Don't Get Distracted By the Wrong Numbers

In both my time as General Counsel of the Army and General Counsel of the Air Force, I participated in the development of the defense budget.  I learned quite a bit about how the Department of Defense looks at the job of developing a budget, and the "trade space" it uses to make trade-offs in coming up with a budget.

As a result of this experience, I have become dismayed at the public debate on military spending.  To be blunt, I find most of the discussion of the appropriate size of the budget insipid and ill-informed--on both sides of the issue.  I thought, therefore, that I should devote a few posts to discussing my views about how we should look at the debate on military spending,  At the end of these posts, I hope that the dialogue among my readers will be more informed, and more focused on the real tradeoffs at issue.  I suspect that the liberals among us will still want a smaller defense budge, and the conservatives will still want larger budgets, but at least the discussion will be more informed.  By way of disclosure, by the way, on this topic, I tend to side with the conservatives.

In today's post I will discuss  two ways of looking at the budget--one generally used by liberals, and the other used by conservatives--that I find particularly misleading and ill-informed.  They are both make for great Bumper Stickers, but they really don't illuminate the real issues.

First, in virtually every discussion on the defense budget, I hear some variant of the argument that  "the United States spends more on defense than half the world combined."  The chart above is used repeatedly in these debates.  While true, this argument is grossly misleading about the capabilities of our potential adversaries.  Take China, for example.  China relies on a very poorly paid, largely conscripted force.  In comparison, the United States relies on a well paid professional military.  If you simply adjust for the difference in compensation, China moves from the fifth largest military spender to the second.  This is true of the cost of the factory workers who build China's weapon systems as well.  So unless you want to pay our military and defense contractor employees near poverty wages, a simple comparison of  the China defense budget to that of the United States does not come close to a true apples-to-apples comparison of the value (in terms of military capacity) of the two countries military spending.  This is also true, by the way, of most of the militaries we care about--including Russia and Iran.

In addition, while the U.S. military has  a global focus, with vital national interests in Europe and the Middle East, and not just Asia, China has a singular focus on Asia.  Thus, even if it has less military capability, it can focus all of its military might on one region, while we need a military that can fight anywhere in the world.

To be clear, there is a legitimate debate about whether we should remain a global power, and that debate will drive decisions on the military budget, but a mindless comparison of military budgets really doesn't illuminate the real debate.

While I hear liberals focused on defense spending by other countries, I hear many conservatives focused on an equally insipid number: how large our military was in previous times in our history.  President Trump, for example, has complained the number of ships in our Navy is at the lowest point  since World War I.  Again, while true, arguments like this really miss the point.  Simply put, the size of our military force is really not a good measure of military effectiveness.  Compare a modern  Cruiser to a World War II Battleship.  A modern Cruiser has global surveillance capabilities that can spot targets over one thousand miles away and kill them with powerful missiles.  In contrast, a World War II Battleship did not really know whether the enemy lurked a hundred miles of way, and it could not destroy the enemy that far away in any event.  The capabilities of a modern fighter such as the F-22 or F-18 is also far more impressive than the fighters of the past.  Indeed, this is true of every weapon in our arsenal--they know more, see more, have much larger range, have a much larger lethality, and can fire at far great speeds.  Simply put, numbers alone really don't matter--it is military capability that matters.

As I will discuss in future posts, the better way to look at the defense budget is to determine our vital national interests, determine the capabilities of those that threaten those interests, and then determine the appropriate force structure necessary to defeat, if necessary, these potential enemies.  In my view, it is this detailed analysis that should be used to determine the size of our defense budget.  This is not a mere math exercise.  To the contrary, there are judgment  calls that need to be made at every point in the analysis.  Moreover, there can be vigorous debates on each of these points in the analysis.  But we should not short-circuit the debate with an insipid reliance on the size of other defense budgets or the size of our military compared to other times in our history.

Next we turn to the first part of the analysis--determining the vital national interests.  View the next post of this series  here.

Defense Spending 101, Part 2: Determining Our National Interests
Defense Spending 101, Part 3: Evaluating the Threat
Defense Spending 101, Part 4: Sizing the Force to Meet the Threat

Why Does Trump Want to Cut National Weather Satellites?

We take lots of things for granted, and perhaps one of the best examples is the highly accurate weather reports we get on the local news every night.  This is not a small thing.  Businesses and people all make critical decisions based on the forecasts that come from complicated computer models run by the National Weather Service.  Billions of dollars and thousands of lives are saved every year as a result of these weather models.

And why am I talking about weather on a national security blog?  Because accurate weather forecasting is critical to the success of military operations.

Critical to the success of these forecasts is a constellation of several billion dollar satellites that are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ("NOAA").  Indeed, ninety percent of the data used to make weather forecasts come from satellites.

I was stunned to learn, therefore, that the Trump Administration has targeted NOAA's weather satellite program with a mission-killing 22% budget cut.  In a "pass-back" instruction to NOAA, the Trump Administration's Office of Management and Budget has requested this steep cut.  Weather satellites?  Really? Why?

By way of background, meteorologists rely on two types of NOAA satellites for the data used to make weather forecasts.  One set of satellites sit in geostationary orbit collecting data on a fixed location on the earth.  The other set of satellites orbit the two poles collecting critical data used to predict storms.  Unfortunately, NOAA's satellites are getting old, and we will soon need to replace them.  The polar satellites are actually already in crisis.  They are already beginning to fail, and are well past their expected life.  If they are not replaced very soon, our national weather forecasting capability will be seriously degraded.

Fortunately, NOAA is working on a replacement polar satellite, known as the Joint Polar Satellite System  ("JPSS").  JPSS-1 will be launched this year, and JPSS-2 will be launched in 2021.
The  JPSS program is not cheap (most satellites are not).  NOAA has budgeted $800 million for JPSS this year alone, and NOAA will need hundreds of millions of dollars for the JPSS program until the mid-2020's.

But now the Trump Administration has instructed Commerce to cut $513 million from the NOAA satellite program-- a cut of 22%.  The folks I talk to who are familiar with the NOAA budget think that the only way to make this cut is to cancel the JPSS program.  It will also mean that plans to replace the other weather satellites will be scraped as well.

So why would the Trump Administration want to destroy our weather forecasting capability?  My theory is that these cuts can only be explained by ignorance about the NOAA satellite program combined  with an ideological hostility to climate change research.  Trump's team apparently thinks that NOAA is doing liberal research about climate change, and doesn't understand that the data from these satellites is largely used for weather forecasting and not climate research.

In the end, I suspect that the NOAA weather satellite program will be restored once Trump's team gets a clue about what they are proposing.  This is because there is a strong constituency for accurate weather forecasts--led by the Department of Defense.  It makes we wonder, however, what other boneheaded, and ill-informed budget cuts are in the OBM pass-backs for programs that don't have such a constituency.

Strategic Patience As a Solution to North Korea?

While the U.S. Government is huge, we do not seem to do a very good job of focusing on more than one big problem at a time.  This is a problem, and it is becoming a big problem now.  With all of the attention to President's Trump's tweet du jour, there is a surprising lack of attention to a real problem:  North Korea is developing the capability to attack the United States with nuclear weapons, and has been firing ballistic missiles to prove it.  Indeed, North Korea just fired six missiles that landed near Japan.

So what do we do about a problem like North Korea?  As I wrote in my previous post, there are no good options.   The use of armed force could result in a catastrophic that could kill hundreds of thousands.  We have negotiated with the North Korean's in the past, and they have a quite bad track record of keeping their commitments.

Given these bad options, perhaps we should do nothing.  That is the suggestion of  Robert Kelly, an associate professor on international relations at Pusan National University in South Korea.  As he argues, strategic patience has worked for the U.S. in the past, and it may well be the best option now:

Patience does suggest waiting, and while this seems demoralizing, I defend it, because more active approaches have huge downsides. This is why, despite the regular ritual of North Korea policy reviews when new administrations take over in Washington or Seoul, we usually end up defaulting back to deterrence and waiting for North Korea and its Chinese patron to change.

Specifically, we are waiting for North Korea to liberalize and/or China to realize that its support for North Korea is more damaging than beneficial. Much as we waited for the internal contradictions of Communism to catch up with the Soviet Union—which they did by the 1980s—so we are waiting for some kind of opening in Pyongyang. We must also wait on China, because Beijing’s assistance to North Korea buys the regime time and space to escape those contradictions. If North Korea were truly isolated, without its Chinese sponsor and with Chinese cooperation on United Nations sanctions, the failures of the North Korean system would accumulate rapidly, much as they did in the late 1990s.

Obviously, these are high hopes. We will be waiting a long time. But that does not obviate the strategy. It worked in the Cold War. And just as more active approaches toward the Soviets, like rollback, had large risks that ultimately made patience and continuing deterrence the best choice, the same applies in Korea. Alternatives to strategic patience are tempting, but risky.

Kelly emphasizes, however, that strategic patience does not really mean we do nothing.  There are steps the affected countries can take while we wait for North Korea and China:

Finally, strategic patience need not mean passivity among the democracies germane to the problem, namely South Korea, Japan and the United States. While we wait for China and North Korea to come around, those actors can: expand their defense spending (especially Japan), bolster missile defense, start taking seriously civil defense, tighten sanctions, and encourage China to enforce sanctions. They can also trim away North Korea’s diplomatic contacts, which it uses for illicit, hard-currency-raising programs, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. So yes, we must be “patient” regarding North Korea and China—there is little other choice—but we need not be passive at home.  

Read it all here.   In effect what Kelly is suggesting has been the policy of the U.S. since the Clinton Administration.  Each Administration does a careful review of the options and rejects both negotiations and armed conflict as the solution.  This policy has not resulted in change, but patience means patience.  Much like the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War took decades of patience, prevailing in North Korea may as well.

What do you think?

Trump Tweets and Guantanamo Recidivism

I don't want to turn this blog into yet another fact-checking site, but the following tweet by President Trump struck me as a "teachable moment" on an important topic:

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017

Is this true?  Not really. The source of this tweet is a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence  that was released yesterday.  It provides the following chart:

Even a cursory review of the chart shows that Trump's tweet is false.  Of the 122 released detainees "confirmed of reengaging", the vast majority--113--were released during the Bush Administration and NOT by President Obama.  This is not  a small mistake, by the way--it is Huge.  Sad.

I think the real story here is the large drop in recidivism after January 2009--from 17.6% to 5.6%.  This is no accident.  The Obama Administration and Congress together created a far more rigorous process for reviewing whether Guantanamo detainees still presented a threat to our national security.  A Periodic Review Board, made of of senior officials from every national security agency now carefully reviews each detainee.  Once they agree that the detainee is releasable, both the State Department and the Defense Department work with the country where the detainee will go to ensure safeguards are in place.  Finally, the Secretary of Defense must personally determine that the safeguards are sufficient to ensure no recidivism.

This process was actually put in place in 2011, and it would interesting to see if the recidivism post-2011 dropped even further.  Sadly, ODNI did not do this analysis.

Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas Law School has a very good post explaining why even these ODNI numbers inflate actual recidivism:

In the above-referenced report, ODNI counted a detainee as engaging in recidivism whenever there was “A preponderance of information which identifies a specific former GTMO detainee as directly involved in terrorist or insurgent activities.” And ODNI’s basis for suspicions involve “plausible but unverified or single-source reporting indicating a specific former GTMO detainee is directly involved in terrorist or insurgent activities.” There are lots of problems with this definition, but here are three: First, it assumes, contra what we now know, that every Guantánamo detainee had previously been engaged in terrorist or insurgent activities (hence the “re” in recidivism). Second, it treats as “recidivism” involvement in amorphous “activities,” without any necessary connection to combat or battlefield activities (or, frankly, the United States)–such that one can be “confirmed of reengaging” through information that places them in the wrong place at the wrong time, without any clearer connection to hostilities or any evidence whatsoever that they “returned to the battlefield,” or did so in the context of the conflict between the United States and al Qaeda and its affiliates. Third, there’s no way to test these numbers, since they’re based upon classified intelligence and “a preponderance of information.” In other words, an unsubstantiated intelligence report that places a former detainee in the wrong part of Yemen at the wrong time can, by itself, apparently be the basis for a determination that the detainee is “confirmed of reengaging.” Intelligence reports have value, but we ought to be careful not to place too much weight on them when reaching broader conclusions about sensitive topics like recidivism.

Read it all here.

By way of full disclosure, I represent one of the Guantanamo detainees now in the Periodic Review Process.

More Thoughts About Trump's Tweets About Alleged Wiretapping

Wow, what a wild ride caused by our Tweeter-in-chief.  In the last day, I have had more time to reflect, and also have received questions about law surrounding national security wiretapping that I thought I should answer here.

First, some basic information about national security wiretapping.  The current law distinguishes two categories of electronic surveillance. If the target of our surveillance is a foreign target located overseas, there is no need for a warrant.  This should not be a surprise.  When no U.S. person is involved and we are listening to conversations overseas, there is no reason to insist on the protections of a court and warrant.  In most cases, we are not listening because of a counter-intelligence or counter-terrorism reason--we simply want to know what those darn foreigners are doing.  Under the law, no warrant is required for such surveillance as long as there is no substantial likelihood that it will acquire communications with a U.S. person.

If the surveillance is occurring in the US or is directed toward a U.S. person (or there is a substantial likelihood that conversations with a US person will be acquired), however, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant by the FISA Court.  The standard for issuing this warrant is that there is probable cause to believe that the target is a "foreign power" or an agent of a "foreign power." An Ambassador to the U.S. located in the Us would be monitored using such a warrant.

For both types of surveillance, U.S. persons that are not the target of the surveillance might, from time to time, have their communications acquired.  The law requires that these communications be "minimized."  In most cases, this means that the identity of the US person will be hidden from all further dissemination of the intelligence, but there is an exception:  the name can be used when it is necessary to understand the foreign intelligence information in the report.

So what does this mean here?  It is highly likely that the US uses these authorities to eavesdrop on communications made by the Russian Ambassador and other Russian officials.  If Trump campaign officials (such as Flynn) communicated with these officials, their conversations will be acquired as well despite the fact that none of these officials were targeted for surveillance.  Given that the counter-intelligence import of the communication was that the Russian officials were speaking to senior members of a Presidential campaign, their identities would not be hidden in any reporting.  David Kris, the former Assistant Attorney General for National Security explains this well in this post about Michael Flynn.

If any Trump officials were targeted for eavesdropping, a FISA warrant would have been required, and the existence of such a warrant suggests that a court was convinced that there was probable cause that these officials were acting as agents of a foreign government--which would be a big deal.  Huge, actually.

As I said in my previous post, I do not think there was such a warrant, and the accounts to the contrary in the press don't ring true.  Since that time, the New York Times is reporting that FBI Director James Comey asked the Department of Justice to publicly reject Trump's assertion that Presidnet Obama ordered the tapping of the phones at Trump Tower.

Second, here some further thoughts on this bizarre event.  It strikes me that these wild accusations need to put in the context of previously outrageously false assertions made by Donald Trump.  Examples of wild and false accusations made by Trump in the past include his claims that President Obama was born outside the U.S,  and that Senator Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  This is sadly, typical behavior by this man, and he seems not to have suffered any consequences for making such wild and false accusations.

I think there are two possibilities at play here: either Trump really believed each of these accusations based on the flimsiest of evidence, or he is cynically using these accusations to distract the American people and the media from matters Trump would rather not discuss.  After all, the tweet storm on wiretapping took place right after Attorney General Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the Russia matter.  What better way to change the narrative.

Both of these possibilities could be true, but I am most disturbed by the first possibility.  If Trump is willing to go public with wild accusations based on little evidence, how will he respond when a right wing commentator makes an accusation against a foreign government?   If he will act as impulsively as he has done here, I fear for our national security.

Some Thoughts About Trump's Tweeted Allegations About Wiretapping

Our tweeter-in-chief is at it again.  In a series of tweets this morning, President Trump alleged that President Obama "had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower."  Although the press have asked the White House for more elaboration, nothing has been forthcoming.  Indeed, it appears most of his staff were themselves surprised at the tweet storm.

It has been well over six hours, and the White House has still not elaborated on the allegations or offered any evidence that they are true.  If they fail to do so, this will only confirm the dangerously impulsive nature of this President.  It suggests that at 6 am on some future morning, he will impulsively order military action based on an article in Breitbart News.

I have no doubt that Trump made these accusations as a way to divert attention from the ever increasing evidence of contacts between Russian officials and his campaign.  His modis operandi (which has worked well up to now) is to deny, deceive and divert.  Ironically, however, if his allegations are true, they actually reinforce  the fact that there is a serious concern by counter-intelligence officials that members of the Trump Campaign were working as agents of the Russian State.

Let me explain.  Presidents do not have any authority to order a wiretap.  Instead, any domestic wiretap for counter-intelligence purposes requires (1) review and work by career prosecutors in the Department of Justice's National Security Division, (2) approval by the Attorney General, and (3) approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") Court.  Approval of a FISA application requires the court find probable cause that the target of the surveillance be a "foreign power" or an "agent of a foreign power."  In other word, a court would only have ordered a wiretap at Trump Tower if there was probable cause that the folks at Trump Tower were agents of the Russian Government.

To be clear, I seriously doubt that there was such a wiretap.  Indeed, senior law enforcement officials in the Obama Administration deny that there was any such wiretap.  Most likely, Trump made these allegations after reading a post on the Breitbart News site. Indeed, some of the specific details alleged in that Breitbart News piece are repeated in Trump's tweets (such as the allegation that the FISA court had initially denied a wiretap), which strongly suggests that Trump's tweet storm was based on the article and not any formal briefing.  And the discussion of the FISA warrants in the article really don't ring true to any of us actually familiar with the process.  But if there was such a wiretap, it suggests that law enforcement and intelligence officials had probable cause that the Trump Campaign was acting as an agent of the Russian government.

Women in Combat: "Shoot Like a Girl"

One of the many changes made during the Obama Administration was the end to most restrictions on women in ground combat roles.  To the Air Force, this was not a issue.  women had been in all air combat roles for years.  Indeed, when I was General Counsel of the Air Force, the commander in Afghanistan made this point by having all-female air combat crews in the air one day.  The big change was in ground combat.

One of the factors that lead to the change in policy was a lawsuit by several active women service members who challenged the policy of exclusion. One  plaintiff, Air Force Major Mary Jennings Hager, who flew medivac helicopters has a new book Shoot Like A Girl that describes her experiences in Afghanistan.  NPR has a great interview with her.  Here are some highlights:

In 2009, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar was shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan while co-piloting an Air National Guard medevac helicopter. Though she was wounded in her rifle arm, Hegar managed to return fire while hanging onto a moving helicopter, which saved the lives of her crew and her patients.

At the time, the Department of Defense allowed female soldiers to participate in air combat, but forbade women from ground combat positions. Hegar tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the rule was often circumvented, which meant that women who served on the ground did not receive credit for combat duty.

.  .  .

On the unofficial ways in which women served in combat in the past

The Marine Female Engagement Team is a great example of that, where they go out and they're the ones who talk to the female locals and have to pat them down if they're going through a checkpoint. That's not something that the culture would allow our male soldiers to do, so there's a need for women in those roles. But because of the policy, they couldn't be assigned to [combat] units, which caused all sorts of problems. ...

They would be what we call "attached" to the unit. They wouldn't get to train with the unit, they wouldn't go home and stay at the same base with the unit, they wouldn't get to know them, they wouldn't get a chance to bond with them. The unit cohesion wouldn't get a chance to form.

On some of the arguments against women serving in combat

They range from concerns that are very legitimate and need to be carefully considered to concerns that are absolutely ridiculous. I think the No. 1 thing that pops up in people's mind is the physical strength issue and whether or not women are physically strong enough to be in combat, which I answer with a couple things: First of all, we've already disproven that that's an issue because there are women serving successfully in combat. Most combat is not a hand-to-hand knife battle that the person who can do the most push-ups is going to end up winning. That's just not the face of modern warfare right now. 

Read it all here.