The other pick last week was K. T. McFarland for Deputy National Security advisor. She was an aide to Henry Kissinger 1970-76. Worked in DOD under Caspar Weinberger and was on the board of the Jamestown Foundation (which used to include Zbigniew Brzezinski). She has worked for Fox News most recently. Don’t know her views on particular issues, but it appears that she is well known inside the community and is a much more mainstream choice than General Flynn.
Hard to ignore all the drama being publically played out over who is going to be who in the new Trump administration. There were two new picks made this last week but they hardly tell us what is going to be the direction of our foreign and defense policy.
For ambassador to the United Nations they choose South Carolina governor Nikki Halley.
Hard to argue with the article. Spending a couple of weeks seeing the inside of hotels in Europe hardly qualifies one to be a foreign policy expert.
There have been 29 acting or approved U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations. Some of these have been very established political names (like Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Adlai Stevenson, George H. W. Bush), some have been established foreign policy experts and even a few have been professional diplomats (what a concept!). This is certainly a pick that is none of the above. This has happened before (Andrew Young’s selection by Jimmy Carter comes to mind). It is an odd pick.
The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has often been a cabinet-level position under democratic presidents but is usually not a cabinet level position under republican presidents. I have not heard, but suspect that this will not be a cabinet-level position. My sense is that she will not be a major player in determining national security policy.
In case you weren’t paying close attention, the Assad government in Syria has been heavily propped up by Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. Iran has had troops there for a while. According to Iran’s Tasnim new agency, they have lost over a thousand of them during the war. That is a surprisingly high figure: Over-1-000-iranian-troops
Mosul is now completely cut-off. Before now, there was still a desert corridor heading off to the west, although I assume the ISIL leaders had bailed out of Mosul long before now: Mosul Completely Surrounded
A few interesting points from the article:
“CNN has repeatedly inquired about military casualty numbers with Iraq’s Joint Operations Command, but the Iraqi military has refused to release that information. It has said it will only give a death toll of its soldiers once the operation is over.”
“In the Kurdistan region, hospitals in the city of Irbil say they receive an average of 80 to 90 people a day from Mosul and the surrounding areas….”
80-90 a day is a lot of civilian casualties, depending on how many days this has been the case.
Slow progress in retaking Mosul and low casualties: mosul-battle
A couple of points that caught my attention:
“Baghdad doesn’t release official casualty figures, but some medics estimate that it is at least in the low dozens.”
“As of late October, US officials said ISIS had lost roughly 900 fighters.”
From 17 October to 1 November, 2,400 precision bombs, artillery rounds, missiles, and rockets were launched into the Mosul area.
So, Iraqi casualties less than 60?…..I have some doubts about the claimed 900 ISIL fighters killed.
Now….tempted to count number of bombs, artillery rounds, etc. per ISIL fighter killed….but not sure this is a particularly meaningful metric.
Anyhow, Mosul is effectively isolated. The main roads have been cut. I gather there is a open area of desert to the west that is not occupied, but any significant movement in the open with our airplanes and drones overhead is probably not advisable. This is fundamentally a mop-up operation, and not surprisingly, it is going slow and with low casualties. We shall see if they take the city in 6 weeks or so.
I still wonder how many ISIL fighters they actually left behind in Mosul.
A U.S. Soldier of 1-6 battalion, 2nd brigade, 1st Army Division, patrols near the wall in the Shiite enclave of Sadr city, Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, June 9, 2008. The 12-foot concrete barrier is has been built along a main street dividing southern Sadr city from north and it is about 5 kilometers, (3.1 miles) long. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
When I deployed to Iraq as an infantry soldier in 2008 I never imagined I would become a pseudo-expert in concrete. But that is what happened—from small concrete barriers used for traffic control points to giant ones to protect against deadly threats like improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and indirect fire from rockets and mortars. Miniature concrete barriers were given out by senior leaders as gifts to represent entire tours. By the end my deployment, I could tell you how much each concrete barrier weighed. How much each barrier cost. What crane was needed to lift different types. How many could be emplaced in a single night. How many could be moved with a military vehicle before its hydraulics failed.
He goes on to explain how concrete barriers were used by U.S. forces for force protection in everything from combat outposts to forward operating bases; to interdict terrain from checkpoints to entire neighborhoods in Baghdad; and as fortified walls during the 2008 Battle for Sadr City. His piece is a testament to both the ingenuity of soldiers in the field and non-kinetic solutions to battlefield problems.
Sorry…..could not resist the cheesy rhyming headline. It looks like Lt. General Michael T. Flynn is going to be nominated as the head of the National Security Council. I don’t know what to make of all the stories positive and negative about him by the various left and right talking heads…..but he did recently publish a book. His “Conclusions” is mostly readable on-line at Amazon.com. Would recommend reading it before reaching any conclusions:
It starts on page 157 and goes to page 180, with several pages missing in between. Chapter 4: “How to Win” is not available on-line.
Now, the National Security Advisor is just that: an advisor. They actually don’t run much. Foreign Policy is handled by the State Department, Defense Policy is handled by the Secretary of Defense (neither which are appointed right now). As the National Security Advisor is the person who regularly (daily?) briefs the president on what is going on the world, they often are very influential. Some, like Henry Kissinger, eclipsed the Secretary of State. Some were not near as visible. It really depends on the person and his relationship with the president. This can also change over time.
Sonar image of the Java Sea bed location where the wreck of the HMS Exeter used to be. [BBC]
The Netherlands and British Ministries of Defense recently announced that the wrecks of three Dutch Navy, three British Navy, and one U.S. Navy ships sunk off the coast of Indonesia during World War II have disappeared. Divers intending to photograph the Dutch ships for a 75th year commemoration of the 1942 Battle of the Java Sea discovered the wrecks were missing. After three dimensional sonar imagery revealed only sea bed indentations where the light cruisers HNLMS De Ruyter and HNLMS Java had been discovered in 2002, and partial remains of the destroyer HNLMS Kortenaer, the diving crew surveyed the other battle wrecks in the Java Sea area and discovered them mostly missing as well.
[BBC]
The British government has condemned what it believes is the result of illegal salvaging of the wrecks of the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter and destroyers HMS Encounter and Electra, and has asked the government of Indonesia to investigate and take “appropriate actions.”
Although some experts expressed skepticism that the Dutch ships had been salvaged from under 70 meters of water, 60 miles off the Indonesian coast, other World War II Pacific naval wrecks have been victims of scavenging in the past. According to the Guardian,
Crews posing as fishermen and using long rubber hoses to stay underwater for hours have scavenged the waters around Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, locating the wrecks and stealing parts, including steel, aluminium and brass.
The potential worth of metal-built shipwrecks is estimated at hundreds of thousands of pounds. Some of the propellors, often the first items to be stolen, are made of phosphor bronze scrap metal, valued at over £2,000 per tonne.
The British Ministry of Defense has also been accused of not doing enough to prevent looting of British and German ships sunk in the North Sea during the World War I Battle of Jutland in 1916.
My new book, with a release date of 1 August, is now available on Amazon.com for pre-order: War by Numbers (Amazon)
It is still listed at 498 pages, and I am pretty sure I only wrote 342. I will receive the proofs next month for review, so will have a chance to see how they got there. My Kursk book was over 2,500 pages in Microsoft Word, and we got it down to a mere 1,662 pages in print form. Not sure how this one is heading the other way.
Unlike the Kursk book, there will be a kindle version.
It is already available for pre-order from University of Nebraska Press here: War by Numbers (US)
It is available for pre-order in the UK through Casemate: War by Numbers (UK)
![[BBC]](https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/British-Shipwrecks-Map.png)
