Like many other states, New Mexico is home to its own fusion center, as the Independent noted in a lengthy story published in August.

The federal assessment of the nation’s fusion centers — which borrows heavily from earlier reports by such internal watchdogs as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accountability Office (GAO) — lists a few privacy, transparency and oversight concerns about the fusion centers. Those concerns include:

• Privacy: The report concludes that “…frequent and serious privacy violations will erode public confidence in the important purposes of the Initiative.” DHS adopts CRS and GAO recommendations that fusion centers step up their privacy training, establish privacy committees to work with local advocates, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and make their policies available to the public.

• Oversight: Concerns are raised about who’s in charge and who’s watch-dogging the intelligence-gathering. As the report’s authors note, the GAO found “confusing lines of authority and the absence of clear rules as a concern in its report, as well. Nearly ten percent of the fusion centers interviewed by GAO were concerned about the lack of guidance on privacy while sharing or storing information.”

• Military-private sector collaboration: One area that is sure to get civil libertarians up in arms is the conflation of businesses and intelligence-gathering, as evidenced by the firestorm set off by the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program involving communications giant AT&T and other firms. The DHS report says that the perceptions that fusion centers have access to vast amounts of private-sector data is “largely unfounded.”

• Data Mining: The report states that the term “data mining” isn’t well understood by the public, which raises concerns about protecting the privacy of personal information collected by the fusion centers and distributed throughout the intelligence food chain. Yet DHS acknowledges that it doesn’t have any 2008 data from the centers to analyze for compliance with federal privacy rules.

• Excessive secrecy: The department recognizes that its veiled activities are “responsible for the mischaracterization of fusion centers as mini-spy agencies or akin to the FBI’s discredited — and
long abandoned — COINTELPRO program.” To counter that perception, it encourages the local fusion centers to make public its privacy policies and legal authority to collect and compile clandestine data — an admirable goal that, by DHS’ own admission, still hasn’t been implemented a decade after the first fusion center was established.

The report notes:

Of course, general fears of excessive secrecy are best allayed by fully implementing the Transparency principle. As this PIA [Privacy Impact Assessment] repeats a number of times, fusion centers are encouraged to publish their privacy compliance documentation, including an individualized PIA; establish a privacy committee to interact with their local privacy advocacy communities; and to listen to and address concerns whenever possible.

• Inaccurate or incomplete information: The report “acknowledges that the more widely information is shared, the greater the possibility that incorrect or incomplete information will have negative consequences for individuals. But to guard against this, the agency is issuing “guidance that fusion centers (a) establish accuracy procedures to help prevent, identify, and correct errors in PII [personal individual information]; and (b) provide error notice to the privacy official of the source agency; adopt and implement policies and procedures for the merger of information, investigation, and correction/deletion/non-use of erroneous or deficient information, and retain PII only as long as it is relevant and timely, closely tracking requirements under” the federal privacy act.

But the report appears to downplay the potential for the misuse of information when the authors note that although increasing protection against such occurrences “is a significant challenge for a broad network of fusion centers, it must be noted that fusion centers are already practiced in regularly reviewing and purging incorrect or stale information held in their Federally-funded criminal intelligence systems,” in compliance with federal regulations.

• Mission Creep: Lastly, the assessment agrees with a CRS conclusion that the fusion centers have gravitated far beyond their initial counterterrorism missions and now include a broader spectrum of crimes as well as a seemingly limitless “all-hazards” scope. The CRS report continues that there is no one model for how state-based fusion centers should be structured and that they must rely on their own patchwork of state privacy and transparency laws since DHS has no jurisdiction in the new missions.

With all the attention paid to the spaceport in southern New Mexico, many may not realize that Albuquerque holds the Space Vehicles Directorate of the U.S. Air Force, housed at Kirtland AFB. According to Charles D. Brunt at the Albuquerque Journal, the “Battlespace Environment Division” is relocating from Hanscom AFB in Massachusetts to round out the work of the directorate. Its mission includes developing advanced surveillance technologies and studying conditions in space that can affect military operations, which it will do in a new Battlespace Environment Laboratory.

Speaking of battles, Daniel Borunds reports for the Las Cruces Sun-News that an e-mail, in Spanish, is making the rounds with a simple holiday wish for three days of peace in Juarez:

In a bloody year in which Juárez was submerged in a war between drug cartels and a crime wave with more than 1,500 homicides, an anonymous e-mail floating in the borderland is asking for “a truce for Christmas in Juárez.”

The e-mail asks for a truce on Dec. 24-26. It is addressed to “narcos, capos, agents, hit men, the press, those affected by violence, friends and others.”

New Mexico will also lose spots on the Senate and House appropriations committees, which determine federal spending levels and earmarks.

All of the state’s representatives in Washington, as well as lobbyists, are aware of the new challenges that the delegation will face as it tries to preserve federal funding for New Mexico’s military installations and national laboratories, while also protecting the state’s energy industry.

“Obviously, seniority matters, and we are going to have to spend a few years rebuilding seniority for the state delegation,” said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the senior Democrat who has served in the Senate for 26 years.

“Tom [Udall] has a lot of experience in Congress and has a lot of friends in the Senate. He will be very able to be effective from the first day he is sworn in. The House members will have more of a learning curve to climb up, since all three are new.”

The members of the new delegation met in Bingaman’s office last month to discuss how they could work together, but the reality is that new members do not have much control in choosing committee assignments, particularly in the House where the decision is left up to the Steering and Policy Committee, a panel of senior Democratic party leaders and committee chairmen.

On some policy issues, regional alliances could trump seniority and party affiliation. The Western Caucus, a group of House lawmakers from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and elsewhere, can shift the outcome of legislation if they organize themselves.

But New Mexicans with experience on Capitol Hill are concerned that won’t be enough.

“When it comes to seniority, we’ve been crippled by the amount of power we lost and ability to have an effect on issues important to the state’s future,” Marco Gonzales, an Albuquerque lawyer who worked for Domenici, said.

“That’s a crippling loss of experience and seniority that in the House and Senate translates into power and ability to get things done. That is going to be what’s critical to New Mexico.”

Lobbyists, too, are wary about the effectiveness of such a freshman-heavy delegation.

“Those of us who are familiar with the workings of Congress understand how important seniority is and the relationships that have developed over time are. From that aspect I absolutely have concerns that we’ve lost a lot of stroke, if you will,” said Bob Gallagher, the president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, a pressure group that lobbies state and federal lawmakers.

Moreover, the benefits of seniority are not always clear to the naked eye. Nobody knows how many times retiring Sen. Pete Domenici blocked spending cuts to New Mexico’s federal installations, for instance. And, although it was not well-known, retiring Rep. Steve Pearce successfully blocked a fellow Republicans from closing a federal law enforcement training center.

“Not only do I have concerns about the items we know about, it’s the items that we never knew about. Whether [it was] something good for New Mexico or something that was prevented behind the scenes that was bad for New Mexico,” Gallagher added.

Pressure on Bingaman

Domenici is retiring after 36 years in Congress and, as a result, he will give up his top spot on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Sen.-elect Tom Udall, who is leaving the House after 10 years, had just won an appointment to serve on the House Appropriations Committee last year. He will give up the seat.

“Domenici will be greatly missed in same way as Clinton P. Anderson, who retired in 1973, and Joe Montoya and Harrison Schmidt,” Kevin Noark, the spokesman for Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), said.

“Both of those senators were strong supporters of the lab. But the lab has always forged a strong working relationship with [New Mexico’s congressional delegation] throughout the years, and that we do not expect to change.”

In 2007, the House approved a $400 million spending cut in funding for Los Alamos, but some of the money was restored in the Senate. With three new House members representing New Mexico, the lab’s advocates are more concerned than ever.

In the House and Senate, it is unlikely that freshman lawmakers will get to serve on the Appropriations Committee or two so-called “exclusive” committees in the House, including Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce.

“I’d be very surprised if any of the freshmen get on the exclusive committees,” Rep.-elect Martin Heinrich said.

Like most lawmakers, Heinrich and Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, also a Democrat, said that they want to match their districts’ needs with their respective interests.

“I have been in discussion with leadership and [the Democratic] Steering and Policy Committee, figuring out how best to use my skill set,” Heinrich said, adding that he wants to serve on a committee that addresses the issues he ran on, including the war in Iraq and energy policy.

“A lot of different committees, Science, Armed Services, Education and Labor, Natural Resources, and Transportation have direct relevance to the 1st Congressional District,” he said.

Lujan, a member of the state’s Public Regulation Commission, said he has approached his committee assignments by trying to match those areas where New Mexico needs support and where he has the “expertise in various areas that would enable me to hit the ground running.”

While key committee assignments will help New Mexico stanch some of the loss in seniority, Bingaman, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Udall will play a disproportionate role in protecting New Mexico’s interests.

Bingaman held a hearing on Wednesday to review investments in alternative and traditional energy projects that could be included in a stimulus package that congressional Democrats are expected to take up in early 2009.

Bingaman also serves on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which reviews all tax legislation coming out of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“A lot is going to be falling on the shoulders of Sen. Bingaman,” said Gonzales, the former Domenici staffer. “In the House, we will have very little impact in terms of appropriations committees. In terms of spending cuts at the labs, [there will be] little defense provided by freshman members.”

The books are featured in a story in The New York Times’s science section, which offers glimpses into the goings-on at Los Alamos and other nuclear sites. The books also “shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat,” writes Times reporter William Broad.

The Times’ story starts with an anecdote set in 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities. J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms.

“That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.

“They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.”

But the author of the story says the books coming some 60 years later portray a different history, but also warn of challenges ahead.

“The take-home message of both books is quite the reverse of Oppenheimer’s grim forecast. But both caution that the situation has reached a delicate stage — with a second age of nuclear proliferation close at hand — and that missteps now could hurt terribly in the future.”

The article, “A Balanced Strategy,” was written before President-elect Barack Obama announced that Gates would continue at the Defense Department. It argues for a substantial redirection of Pentagon intellectual attention and budgetary resources away from traditional state-on-state conflict and toward asymmetrical challenges to U.S. power, with a heavy emphasis on the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it condemns how “military and civilian elements of the United States’ national security apparatus have responded unevenly and have grown increasingly out of balance.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A fundamental argument made by Gates is that military solutions in the war on terrorism — what he describes as “a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign” — are rarely sufficient. “Where possible,” he writes, “what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit.”

“As secretary of defense,” he continues, “I have repeatedly made the argument in favor of institutionalizing counterinsurgency skills and the ability to conduct stability and support operations. I have done so not because I fail to appreciate the importance of maintaining the United States’ current advantage in conventional war fighting but rather because conventional and strategic force modernization programs are already strongly supported in the services, in Congress, and by the defense industry.”

Gates also blasts the Pentagon’s bizarre desire to treat the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as inconvenient distractions from a future of conventional warfare, a tendency reflected in the budgetary trick of funding the wars separately from the annual defense budget. “We must not be so preoccupied with preparing for future conventional and strategic conflicts that we neglect to provide all the capabilities necessary to fight and win conflicts such as those the United States is in today,” Gates writes.

Rarely in U.S. history has the country’s chief defense official so forthrightly embraced counterinsurgency, a complex mix of “politico-military techniques developed to neutralize armed rebellion against constituted authority,” to use the parlance of a forthcoming government handbook. Gates praises “the Special Forces community and some dissident colonels” as being a lonely outpost within the defense community pushing for a greater embrace of counterinsurgency. Asked if the rising generation of theorists/practitioners of counterinsurgency could have a more vocal champion at the helm of the Defense Department, Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, replied, “No, they couldn’t.”

This is not Gates’ first foray into making these arguments publicly. In late September, he gave a speech at National Defense University contending that counterinsurgency campaigns like Iraq and Afghanistan “cannot be considered exotic distractions or temporary diversions” from state-on-state wars. The speech appears to have formed much of the template for the defense secretary’s Foreign Affairs piece. And an early priority of Gates’ was to support the transference of many Defense Department responsibilities in Iraq to the State Department In 2007, he testified to Congress in favor of a diplomat hiring surge.

An obvious implication of Gates’ argument that warfare is likely to have have a asymmetric future is that the Pentagon should reorient its budget away from massive weapons systems with dubious applicability in such a threat environment. While he concedes that there is a place for conventional systems, Gates laments in his article that “the base budget for fiscal year 2009, for example, contains more than $180 billion for procurement, research, and development, the overwhelming preponderance of which is for conventional systems.”

Korb, now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, raised an eyebrow at Gates’ lament. “I agree it’s out of balance, but he sent that budget up,” Korb noted. “He’s had a couple years to make budgets, and I haven’t seen those changes in them.”

Gates has attracted recent criticism from loyalists of his counterinsurgency-shy predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, for not embracing the Rumsfeld legacy of promoting technologically intensive alternatives to ground power. In a recent essay for the conservative National Review magazine’s website, Lawrence Di Rita, a former Rumsfeld aide, said Gates’ reappointment indicated that Obama had endorsed “a status-quo element within the Pentagon that resisted the post-Cold War defense transformation that began in the late 1990s.”

Intentionally or not, Gates rejects the Rumsfeld legacy, writing, “The United States does not have the luxury of opting out [of irregular warfare] because these scenarios do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war.” He uses a Rumsfeld-era catch phrase from the Iraq war to deride the idea that “it is possible to cow, shock, or awe an enemy into submission.”

Not everything in Gates’ Foreign Affairs piece is likely to please Obama fans. While the secretary comes close to arguing that weapons systems designed for the Cold War are foolish purchases, he does not single out any programs for abolition — and, rather, writes about the applicability of those systems, in some cases, to asymmetric conflict. “Conventional modernization programs will continue to have, and deserve, strong institutional and congressional support,” he writes.

Nor, Korb pointed out, does Gates specifically propose “allocating a portion of [the Defense Department] budget” to civilian agencies.

“Are you willing to put less into defense?” Korb wondered. “Will you trade off F-22s [aircraft] or DDG-1000s [Naval destroyers] for that capacity? Money is, in fact, an object.”

Still, it’s possible that Gates will enjoy greater freedom to experiment under Obama than under President George W. Bush. Obama envisioned a national-security approach that “skillfully uses, balances and integrates all elements of American power” in the Monday announcement of his national security team.

“I’m certain the Obama administration will be much more receptive to this,” Korb said. “Hopefully [Gates] will make the changes he’s talking about.”

The DDG-1000 Zumwalt (navy.mil)

WASHINGTON — There was tension in the House of Representatives hearing room July 31 as Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) called to order a meeting of the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee. “This may very well be the most important hearing this subcommittee has held since our hearing last January on the procurement of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles,” Taylor said.

The MRAPs he referred to are specialized armored vehicles designed to protect U.S. troops from roadside bombs in Iraq, the biggest killer of Americans. Since 2006, the Pentagon has spent more than $10 billion in a rush to buy the 15-ton vehicles, which have reportedly saved scores of American lives.

The subject of the July hearing — the topic that had Taylor and his fellow committee members on edge — was a multibillion-dollar warship program that was an order of magnitude more complex than MRAP, five times as expensive and potentially as important. It’s called the DDG-1000 Zumwalt, a ship class that the Navy had hailed as the linchpin of a new military strategy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But after more than a decade of development at a cost of billions of dollars, the Navy announced in July that it no longer wanted the new ship. Problem was, the sea service couldn’t come up with a coherent reason why.

The decision on DDG-1000 had come out of the blue. And it turned upside down the Navy’s expensive, delicate plans to boost the size of its fleet and improve its ability to operate close to resource-rich, heavily populated shorelines.

The decision sparked protests from shipyards and defense contractors that had started building DDG-1000s. The munitions industry looked to Congress for an explanation — but Congress had none to offer. The decision to kill the new destroyer had been made without consultation with elected representatives. Even now, five months later, the Navy’s rationale for ending the $50-billion DDG-1000 program seems full of contradictions, casting doubt on the Navy’s ability to manage complex weapons buys at a time when the financial crisis and a new administration might force defense budgets to shrink.

A Departure for the Navy

The new destroyer was intended to protect U.S. sailors fighting in the world’s most dangerous sea zones — shallow, rocky, near-shore waters called “littorals.”

The world’s littorals are rich in resources and home to a growing portion of the world’s population. Patrolling and fighting in littorals pose unique dangers. The water is shallow and turbulent, and the proximity to shore means warships can be threatened by land-based weapons and short-range high-speed boats.

Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has kept to deep waters — where big, expensive ships are safe from land-based threats and free to maneuver without risk of running aground. The Navy designed its ships to suit the deep.

That began to change in 1994, when the sea service launched the $10-billion design effort for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt. By 2006, it was time to build the first one, and the Navy had to tell congressional budgeters how many it wanted.

With the per-vessel cost projected to exceed $3 billion — and possibly reach $5 billion, according to one estimate — the Navy decided it could afford only seven DDG-1000s. Congress approved the plans and funded construction of the first two ships.

Then this year the Navy announced it wanted to buy only the two previously funded Zumwalts and cancel the other five. It was the first major shipbuilding decision by the Navy’s new top officer, Adm. Gary Roughead, who had taken command in 2007. It was a big one — an acquisitions program nearly 15 years in the making was scuttled.

Naval shipyards and other defense contractors were out tens of billions of dollars in projected revenue. And Congress — Taylor’s powerful subcommittee, particularly — was caught in the middle, befuddled by the reversal and left holding the purse strings for a Navy strategy that, suddenly, seemed to lack direction.

To be sure, the Navy had an alternate plan. In the place of the axed DDG-1000s, the sea service said it wanted to buy up to 12 more of its older destroyer class, the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke. The Navy has 62 Burkes in service or on order.

While the Navy’s announcement came as a surprise to elected officials and industry representatives, there also were strong arguments to ditch the destroyer. Zumwalt is expensive, with a per-ship price potentially exceeding $4 billion, not counting R&D. The most recent Burkes, by contrast, cost around $2.2 billion apiece, again not counting R&D (most of which was completed in the 1990s).

The Navy now has roughly 280 front-line ships and wants to boost that number to 313 in about 15 years by buying more than a dozen ships a year — double the average rate in the 1990s and early 2000s. Squeezing more ships out of the roughly $20-billion-a-year shipbuilding budget is therefore critical.

In that context, the DDG-1000 costs “a lot of money,” Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, the Navy’s top technologist, testified in March before Taylor’s subcommittee.

A Startling Admission

But when McCullough testified at Taylor’s July hearing, he said little about cost. Now the Navy was killing off its new destroyer project because the ship “cannot perform area air defense; specifically, it cannot successfully employ the Standard Missile-2, SM-3 or SM-6, and is incapable of conducting Ballistic Missile Defense,” McCullough said.

This was a big deal. Recent classified naval studies had found what McCullough called “increased war-fighting gaps, particularly in the area of integrated air- and missile-defense capability,” against ballistic missiles similar to ones that China could fire and against small cruise missiles like those used by the terror group Hezbollah against the Israeli Navy in the 2006 Lebanon war. Both missile types are particularly dangerous in near-shore waters.

As wonky as such technical details might sound, jaws practically dropped when McCullough made the assertion about the Zumwalt and its missile capability. For good reason. As recently as March, the Navy had stated — on the record — that Zumwalt was better at air defense than any other warship and less vulnerable in shallow waters.

McCullough’s pronouncement represented a startling — and, to some, seemingly absurd — 180-degree turn on a program costing as much as $50 billion over two decades.

Bigger Questions

The Zumwalt decision immediately raised questions about the Navy’s ability to plan, execute and rationalize complex weapons programs. There are indications that the shuffle is driven as much by the obscure preferences of the Navy’s top officer as by any careful analysis of U.S. defense needs.

“This whole thing is very strange,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) said after hearing about the proposed Zumwalt cuts. Collins, a reliable Navy booster, counts one of the nation’s biggest shipyards in her constituency. She said she had not seen any documentation justifying the Navy’s sudden decision.

Neither had the chief Pentagon weapons buyer, John Young. He called the announcement “a little unusual” and said the Navy needed to do more analysis of the potential costs and benefits of a switch.

At least one firm involved in designing and building DDG-1000s is equally perplexed. “It doesn’t make sense,” Dan Smith, a vice president at Raytheon, told The Washington Independent. Raytheon makes Zumwalt’s radars. Smith said that “the pieces were all there” to make the Zumwalt class capable of using all the Navy’s missiles — and even using them better than any other warship, with just a little extra cash.

Smith said that for Zumwalt to fire SM-2s, the Navy needs only to fund the completion of an electronic data-link that allows the missile and the ship’s S-band radar to “talk” to each other. The Navy said that data-link would cost $80 million. With that addition, the DDG-1000 would be as capable as a DDG-51, which also has an S-band radar, Smith said. Indeed, the two ships’ weapons systems would be nearly identical.

With an extra few hundred million — “three times” the cost of the data-link, according to Smith — the Navy could link SM-2 missiles to the DDG-1000’s second radar, a futuristic X-band system, making the vessel an even better “air defender” than the DDG-51.

Smith’s claims weren’t the empty promises of a salesman. As late as March, Capt. Jim Syring, the Navy’s DDG-1000 program manager, was giving briefings that cited DDG-1000’s “significant capability improvements in every warfare area vs. DDG-51” — including air defense using Standard missiles.

As for Ballistic Missile Defense, Smith said it would cost $550 million to do the R&D to give Zumwalt BMD capability, plus $110 million per ship outfitted. That cost is consistent with an Navy plan to add BMD capability to 18 older ships, including DDG-51s, for a total of $1.2 billion, not counting R&D.

So if DDG-1000 really is as capable as DDG-51, if not more so, why did the Navy use capability as a rationale for axing Zumwalts? Smith said he doesn’t know. “They don’t connect,” he said of the Navy’s tactics for justifying shipbuilding decisions. Reached for comment, a Navy spokesman only repeated the major points of McCollough’s controversial July testimony.

To be sure, even if the upgrades for air- and missile-defense for the DDG-1000 are relatively affordable, the total vessel — including special long-range guns and a radar-deflecting hull — is pricey. For that reason, the Navy’s decision to curtail the program “made perfect sense,” according to Bob Work, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. But the sea service “kind of gooned up selling” its destroyer plans to Congress, Work told The Washington Independent.

The “gooned-up” salesmanship belies a year-long campaign by Chief of Naval Operations Roughead to end the Zumwalt program, sources say. Roughead apparently opposed the DDG-1000 when he took over the Navy’s top position last September. He soon began chipping away at support for the program. That meant dealing with four key Zumwalt supporters: Dep. Defense Sec. Gordon England;Pentagon acquisitions chief Young; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen; and Rear Adm. Charles Goddard, then the Navy’s top shipbuilder.

England, Young and Mullen are all senior to Roughead: changing their minds was a delicate process. “Behind scenes,” Work says, “Roughead was trying to convince those guys they made a bad decision” regarding plans to buy seven Zumwalts. In time, he succeeded.

The fourth key supporter, Goddard, was relieved of command for allegedly mistreating women while drunk during official travel. The path was clear for Roughead to end the DDG-1000 and switch to a vessel he preferred — the tried-and-true DDG-51.

Does the Navy Have a Littoral Strategy?

But if DDG-1000 is superior to DDG-51 in shallow waters, as the evidence indicates, does the switch to the older warship represent a shift in the Navy’s littoral strategy. In abandoning its potentially most powerful littoral warships, is the Navy actually abandoning littoral warfare?

The consequences of such a move would be enormous. After all, the Navy’s own Maritime Strategy, published last year, emphasized that “lifeblood” global trade “relies on free transit through increasingly urbanized littoral regions.”

The world’s littorals include Iraq’s national waters, a heavily trafficked area where the country’s only two oil terminals are located, and resource-rich Somali waters infested with hundreds of heavily armed pirates riding in speedboats. The Navy currently has only a handful of ships capable of maneuvering around the terminals or chasing pirates close to land. Under plans finalized in 2006, the Navy would have bought more than 60 new littoral warships — 55 lightweight “Littoral Combat Ships” plus seven of the heavier DDG-1000s.

Since the plans were developed, cost overruns on the LCS prompted Congress to cancel three of the first seven. Combined with LCS’s problems, the recent cuts to DDG-1000 might represent a gutting of the future littoral fleet at a time when near-shore threats are growing.

With anti-ship missiles, small gunboats and sea mines proliferating in littoral zones, the Navy seems to have decided to pull back its amphibious vessels, which carry Marines, and keep them at least 25 miles from shore, Gen. James Conway, Marine Corps commandant, said in September. The littorals are just too dangerous for existing Navy ships and their crews.

Without the right warships, the Navy might never “re-take” shallow waters. In that sense, the DDG-1000 perhaps occupies a similar position as other expensive weapons systems — like the bomb-resistant MRAP trucks — whose urgency trumps price.

Nonetheless, under Roughead’s leadership, the Navy does appear to be abandoning its littoral ambitions, as much for cost reasons as anything else. This despite the Maritime Strategy’s promise that “we will not permit conditions under which our maritime forces would be impeded from freedom of maneuver and freedom of access.” The mysterious destroyer shuffle that (publicly) started in July appears to be both a cause and a consequence of the littoral retreat.

But with a new administration about to take office in January, that might change. The Navy can only propose shipbuilding changes: Congress and the president hold the purse strings. Already, Congress has pressured the Navy to add back one of the canceled DDG-1000s, for an eventual total of three. The new administration might restore more.

“Anything could happen,” Work says.

David Axe is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

President-elect Barack Obama meeting General David Petraeus on the runway at Baghdad International Airport last July.

WASHINGTON — During his July trip to Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama met with a man who represents both an opportunity and an obstacle to his presidency: Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. Petraeus, a hero to many Americans for his management of the war in Iraq, argued in a private briefing that military commanders should be given wide latitude in handing the future course of the war — though Obama was running for president on a platform calling for a withdrawal of combat troops in 16 months.

The meeting offered a test for a relationship that might help define Obama’s term in office. Though he’s talked about governing in a bipartisan fashion, Obama ran for office as a progressive opposed to the Iraq war. The uniformed military, typically wary of liberals in general, is unsure what to think about Obama — and the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, stumbled early in his relationship with the military.
Yet Obama struck a balance in the Petraeus meeting. “If I were in his shoes, I’d probably feel the same way” about preserving flexibility for military operations, Obama said of Petraeus after the meeting ended. “But my job as a candidate for president and a potential commander in chief extends beyond Iraq.”

To Peter Feaver, one of the leading scholars of civil-military relations, that comment was auspicious. “Obama had it pitch-perfect,” said Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University and a national-security staffer for both Clinton and George W. Bush. “Obama was right to signal to the military, ‘I want your military advice, and I will factor it into my strategic decisions, where military advice is one of my concerns.’”

Whether a Commander-in-Chief Obama can continue the tone that Candidate Obama sounded in July remains to be seen. According to interviews with active and retired military officers, Obama and the military can have a productive relationship, provided that Obama operates along some simple principles. Consult, don’t steamroll — and don’t capitulate. Be honest about disagreements, and emphasize areas of agreement. Make Petraeus a partner, not an adversary.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Similarly, the uniformed military will have to keep certain principles in mind as well. There’s only one commander in chief, and you’re not him. Don’t substitute military judgment for strategic judgment.

Obama enters office without some of the impediments to healthy civil-military relations that hindered Clinton. Clinton, a baby boomer, had to deal with the legacy of not serving in Vietnam, while Obama, born in 1961, doesn’t have the baggage of the Vietnam era weighing him down. “He didn’t serve, but he didn’t serve with distinction,” said Feaver, laughing.

Similarly damaging to Clinton was his early misstep with gays in the military. During Clinton’s transition from candidate to president, he seemed to suggest lifting the ban on gays serving openly, an implication seized on by conservatives and met with furor from the armed services. His response was to back down — which set a tone to the military that an uncertain Clinton could be rolled.

Defense Dept. officials today still believe Clinton’s early capitulation set a troublesome precedent. “If Clinton has simply ordered the military to lift the ban on gays in the military — as Truman did with racial integration against near universal opposition,” said one Pentagon official who requested anonymity, “he would have been much better off in dealing with the military for the rest of his administration. There would have been a big fuss, but they would have respected him more.”

The lesson for Obama, this official continued, is “not to get rolled or railroaded by the top brass, as Clinton and his civilian team were by Colin Powell,” who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. “Obama and his team need to be respectful and solicitous of senior military advice, but leave no doubt about who is in charge.”

Yet Obama doesn’t wish merely not to be railroaded. Much as with the Petraeus meeting in July, Obama’s team has signaled an openness to the military since coming to Washington. One of Obama’s first foreign-policy aides in the Senate, Mark Lippert, deployed to Iraq in 2007 as a Naval reservist. Several of his principle advisers today command widespread Pentagon respect.

Former Sen. Sam Nunn, who served as a longtime chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and is now an influential military reformer, is advising Obama’s Pentagon transition.Michele Flournoy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the second Clinton term andprominent authority on counterinsurgency, is helping run Obama’s Pentagon headhunting process. Most important, Obama’s aides have flirted in the past week with asking Bob Gates, the current defense secretary, to stay on for an extra year.

In addition to benefiting from succeeding a widely-disliked defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Gates’s brief tenure at Defense has earned plaudits from around the military, especially as he worked closely with Petraeus in implementing the troop surge in Iraq last year.

“Keeping Gates is a huge gesture to the military,” said Ian Moss, a Marine corporal who recently left active duty. “Simply put, from my conversations with military personnel, there is much respect for Gates. By retaining Gates, Obama instantly communicates to military personnel that he values their assessment of Gates.”

Feaver said the Gates trial balloon indicated that Obama doesn’t intend to govern in an “Anything But Bush” manner — rigidly rejecting every aspect of the Bush legacy as a matter of principle. “The very fact that they want send that signal is a positive from the point of view of civil-military relations,” he said. “If it’s not a trial balloon, and they actually do it, it would further cement an emerging view of Obama as a pragmatist.”

One early decision that many in the military likely look to is whether Obama holds to his position on withdrawing from Iraq according to a fixed timetable. As with the country as a whole, there is no unanimity of opinion on Iraq within the military. But at the very least, the war is more personal to the military than it is to the civilian population. Many view this withdrawal with anxiety.

Feaver said it would be useful for Obama to blur the difference between his withdrawal proposals and Petraeus’ plan to shift the U.S. footprint to “strategic overwatch” functions, like training Iraqi troops — though Petraeus’ plan has no timetable associated with it.

“If what he’s describing is a target, a goal that’s desirable, that he’ll shoot for, and work to make conditions on the ground consistent with… then that’s not really much of a problem,” Feaver said. But if, on the other hand, Obama really does intend to withdraw two combat brigades every month — as he indicated during the Democratic presidential primaries, “then that would spark a civil-military — I won’t say crisis, but a challenge to manage,” Feaver pointed out.

Some members of the military community are more sanguine. Several say that if they disagree with the decision, they respect Obama’s authority to make it.

“In the end, we are not self-employed. And after the military leadership provides its best military advice, it is up to the policy-makers to make the decision and for the military to execute those decisions,” said a senior Army officer recently back from Iraq, who requested anonymity because he is still on active duty. “Now, if those in the military do not like the decision, they have two choices. One, salute smartly and execute the missions given them to the best of their ability. Or, the other, leave the military if they do not feel they can faithfully execute their missions. That is one way the military does get to vote in an all-volunteer force.”

Moss agreed. “The military will just follow the order,” he said. “The great majority of Americans want U.S. forces out of Iraq. This is part of the reason Obama was sent to the White House.”

Much as with Obama’s pick for secretary of defense, many in the military will watch how Obama and Petraeus interact as a barometer for civil-military harmony. To some degree, there could be an invisibility to the relationship — as the senior Army officer said, “most will not know about or see” what the president says to his Central Command chief — but it could still be closely scrutinized.

Not everyone is convinced that there will be tension between Obama and Petraeus. “I am certain Gen. Petraeus will fulfill the mission as tasked by the [secretary of defense] and the [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] without question,” said Malcolm Nance, a former instructor of Navy special forces who has spent extensive periods in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I am certain as a combat officer of great intellect, a superlative battle staff and open mindedness, his real mission is singular: break Al Qaeda and kill the Al Qaeda senior leadership. He did it in Iraq and he intends to do it in Afghanistan if given the chance.

“There will be no MacArthurs here,” Nance continued, referring to the legendary Army general whom President Harry S Truman fired for insubordination during the Korean War. And for their part, Nance predicted, “the phrase ‘pleasantly surprised’ should come to the lips of all military personnel who meet with Obama,” judging from the inclusiveness Obama showed in his campaign.

Robert Mackey, a retired Army officer, said that both Petraeus and the new Iraq commander, Gen. Ray Odierno, can work with Obama despite disagreements on Iraq. “I think that both are pretty good thinkers, more than able to understand that change is going to occur and that their job is to complete whatever mission [Obama] orders them to do,” Mackey said. “They don’t have to be Obama’s buddies to do the job. In fact, that would most likely reflect poorly on the administration within the military.”

Indeed, the differences between Obama and Petraeus or Odierno on Iraq might turn out to be healthy for civilian-military relations. Judging from how the July meeting with Petraeus in Baghdad went, “Obama should be in good shape,” said the Pentagon official. “It will be a refreshing change from recent years, when civilian political leaders have shirked off tough questions about — and responsibility for — their war policies by claiming, in effect, that they’re just taking directions from the commanders on the ground, in effect, hiding behind the skirts of the military.”

Moss agreed. Institutional pushback is “not a bad thing” necessarily, he said. “If anything, the major lesson from the past decade should be that the solutions to the challenges we face must be approached from multiple angles, and that is what Obama has signaled as his intention.”

Like Feaver, the anonymous senior Army officer expected Obama to make Petraeus a partner on Iraq and other issues. “Once President-elect Obama is in office,” the officer said, “he can very easily shift his view based on advice he has received, as well as the situation on the ground at the time, since he has left himself an out or two over time. It would be surprising to see him go completely against Gen. Petraeus, since I would think [Obama] would rather have him in uniform than out — where he would then be free to provide commentary on the decisions that have been made.”

Another challenge for Obama, beyond Petraeus and Iraq, would be senior officers’ desire “to get back to preparing –and procuring — for the big, conventional Russia-China scenario the U.S. military institutionally prefers,” the anonymous Pentagon official said. But the current financial crisis and massive budget deficits create their own pressures on defense spending.

It’s not difficult to understand why the talk circulated. Flournoy boasts an enviable resume. A veteran of the Clinton Pentagon, she worked on counter-proliferation issues before playing a large role in shaping the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, an overview of defense strategy and its implementation.

After leaving government service, Flournoy took a high-profile job at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent Washington policy organization, before co-founding the Center for a New American Security, an increasingly influential defense think tank, in 2007.

It’s not just Flournoy. CNAS, as it’s known, is widely considered a likely feeder for the Obama Pentagon, though the organization disputes this — preferring to bill itself as nonpartisan. What CNAS does not dispute is that, over the course of the past two years — overnight, in Washington terms — it has emerged as an energetic center for studying contemporary defense issues, including Iraq, counterinsurgency and the national-security effects of climate change.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

CNAS fellows like John Nagl, Colin Kahl, Vikram Singh, Shawn Brimley, Nate Fick and Roger Carstens will likely be key players in the defense debates of the next several years — whether they join an Obama administration or not. If they do join the administration, however, expect counterinsurgency to be a major focus of the next Pentagon team.

“There are many good policy organizations in the current national-security debate, and the team at CNAS should be recognized for their important contribution,” said Rudy DeLeon, deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. “In particular, they have helped give field- and company-grade officers a clear voice in the policy discussion.”

For years, Flournoy has been touted as the odds-on favorite to be the country’s first woman secretary of defense. While Obama isn’t believed to be considering her for that position, many in Washington defense circles are saying that she’s a shoo-in for an important Pentagon job, as is CNAS’s other co-founder, Kurt Campbell, another veteran of the Clinton Pentagon and National Security Council staff.

As of Friday afternoon, though, Flournoy was still at her desk at the Center for a New American Security. “She is still employed here,” said Price Floyd, a spokesman for CNAS. “In fact, she’s in the office today.”

Similarly, Floyd said he is unaware if the Obama transition team has approached the think tank’s leaders and fellows. “I have no idea. Not a clue,” he said. “If they had, the saying in Washington is those who know, don’t say, and those who say, don’t know. I don’t fit in that category.” CNAS fellows and leaders declined to comment for this article.

From its inception, CNAS has demonstrated an ability to “punch above our weight,” as Floyd put it. The think tank’s launch event, in June 2007, was at the baroque Willard Hotel near the White House — a favored locale for CNAS gatherings, owing both to its grandeur and its proximity to the think tank’s offices at 13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

Among the featured speakers were former Defense Sec. William Perry; Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.); Princeton University’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Philip Zelikow, then counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The introductory panel was moderated by former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, Obama’s chief defense adviser and a potential secretary of defense. A keynote was delivered by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), then the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the time, many believed that CNAS would be a feeder for her administration. Floyd disputed that — “we got that rap, that we were Hillary’s shadow, in-waiting” Pentagon, he remembered — and added that the goal of the organization was always to be bipartisan, but not bipartisan for its own sake.

“We bring people together,” Floyd said, “not for a lowest-common-denominator bipartisanship, but for pragmatic solutions for problems we face.” CNAS papers are often vetted through an informal peer-review process, with experts at liberal, centrist and conservative think tanks.

Still, some progressives have said that CNAS occasionally substitutes received wisdom for rigor. “I think CNAS’s work on Iraq, in particular, has been unduly tied to the conventional wisdom,” said Matthew Yglesias, a leading liberal blogger for the Center for American Progress, another Washington policy organization, “and sometimes seems more focused on trying to find ways to appear judicious and moderate than on trying to find solutions that are equal to the scale of the problem.”

Michele Flournoy (cnas.org)

Much as Iraq has shaped the defense establishment over the past five and a half years, so too has it shaped CNAS. Its first Iraq policy, “Phased Transition: A Responsible Way Forward and Out of Iraq,” argued against firm deadlines for withdrawing U.S. troops, but also rejected an indefinite commitment to the country.

While several fellows, including Nagl and Kahl, have expressed support for President George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge, CNAS’s follow-up paper, “Shaping the Iraq Inheritance” — written by Kahl, Flournoy and Brimley — focused on how to accomplish a withdrawal of U.S. forces without leaving a political and security vacuum behind.

Floyd contended that CNAS’s Iraq position has become the Washington consensus position. We were able to describe a responsible withdrawal,” he said, “and, in essence, the discussion is how to do that. It’s not if it will be done.”

Counterinsurgency, however, is probably the defense issue most closely associated with the think tank. Before Nagl retired from the Army this summer, he was one of the service’s leading counterinsurgency scholar-advocate-practitioners — putting counterinsurgency theory into practice as a battalion commander in Iraq and helping write the landmark 2006 Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual.

At CNAS, Nagl put forward a provocative proposal to create a corps within the Army devoted to training foreign military forces in how to suppress internal rebellions. Several attendees of last week’s Counterinsurgency Leaders’ Conference at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., openly speculated whether Nagl would be made deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and stability operations, the key civilian Pentagon brief for irregular warfare.

Nagl is hardly alone. Kahl, a veteran of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, is another leading counterinsurgency expert, focusing on Iraq, to which he’s made numerous trips in the brief time he’s been at CNAS.

Fick, a Dartmouth graduate and Marine veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan — where he taught at Kabul’s Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy — has achieved a degree of prominence in both counterinsurgency circles and popular culture. A book chronicling his platoon’s place in the Iraq invasion, “Generation Kill,” was recently made into an HBO mini-series by David Simon, co-creator of “The Wire.”

Fick and Singh, who served in a variety of nonpolitical Pentagon jobs during the Bush administration, spent the late summer traveling through Afghanistan. They became two of the earliest and most prescient advocates of negotiating with elements of the Taliban, an initiative since pursued by the government of Hamid Karzai.

Prominent counterinsurgents give CNAS top marks, and view the absorption of its scholars into an Obama administration as an indicator of the new president’s embrace of counterinsurgency.

“I’ve been following CNAS since its inception, know many of the personnel there and, bottom-line, have been quite impressed with their analysis and recommendations on the important issues associated with national security,” said Dave Dilegge, editor of Small Wars Journal, a blog that has become the virtual forum of the counterinsurgency community, in an email. “The thing that impresses me the most is, that while conventional wisdom has held that CNAS was the ‘holding ground’ for an Obama administration, their work reflects a nonpartisan stance that would stand well in any administration — Democrat or Republican. When it comes to issues concerning irregular warfare and a whole government approach to complex operations, they have some of the best and brightest.”

Floyd said the focus of several of CNAS’s scholars on counterinsurgency reflects the think tank’s broader mission to take fresh approaches to national security. “On the face of it,” Floyd said, it was fair to view CNAS as a counterinsurgency-heavy organization.

“But more important,” Floyd added, “is that it’s not so much that as that we’re looking at the current and future challenges of the United States. Right now a lot of our scholars have come to the conclusion that the best ways to deal with them are through counterinsurgency and counterinsurgency-like ideas.”

On that count, state Department of Veterans Services Deputy Secretary Lou Helwig has some good news, some dangerously stretched budgets and some advice for a nation that needs to prepare for health care costs that could, long-term, outstrip the tallies of both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

“We really haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg yet,” Helwig said of the 26,000 New Mexicans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. “The most apparent issue is the prostheses they’re wearing, but that’s not the main issue.”

The larger issues are post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

“The average veteran has had seven concussions,” Helwig said. “And many are much more than a concussion. With these IEDs (improvised explosive devices), you can get a mild concussion being a mile away.”

Because the symptoms of TBI are new and because they mimic those of PTSD, the medical profession is scrambling to develop treatment protocols – including accurate diagnoses. To their credit, Helwig said, health care professionals are devising innovative solutions.

“Out of war comes some of the most amazing medical things,” he said, “but it’s a heckuva way to get them.”

Nationally, the toll is grim. One in five veterans suffers from depression or a stress disorder, and less than half of the 300,000 affected are getting help. More than 70,000 are paying too much for rent and are at risk of homelessness. At least 430 veterans have committed suicide.

The VA’s count is not a complete one, however. It does not include members of the military who returned from Iraq and then killed themselves before being discharged from the service – people like Sgt Brian Rand, who shot himself in the head after returning home from his second tour.

It also doesn’t include the deaths of people like Sgt. James Dean, who was shot by Maryland state troopers after he barricaded himself in his father’s farmhouse. Observers call those deaths “suicide by cop.”

And it doesn’t include the deaths of people like Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, a 32-year-old Indiana National Guardsman who died at Fort Knox five months after returning from Iraq with brain damage from a roadside bomb.

How many more American deaths continue to go uncounted?

It’s not as if no one saw it coming. In 2007, Linda Bilmes of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, analyzed the state of care available for returning vets. Her conclusions:

(a) the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is already overwhelmed by the volume of returning veterans and the seriousness of their health care needs, and it will not be able to provide a high quality of care in a timely fashion to the large wave of returning war veterans without greater funding and increased capacity in areas such as psychiatric care; (b) the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) is in need of structural reforms in order to deal with the high volume of pending claims; the current claims process is unable to handle even the current volume and completely inadequate to cope with the high demand of returning war veterans; and (c) the budgetary costs of providing disability compensation benefits and medical care to the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of their lives will be from $350 - $700 Billion, depending on the length of deployment of US soldiers, the speed with which they claim disability benefits and the growth rate of benefits and health care inflation. Key recommendations include: increase staffing and funding for veterans medical care particularly for mental health treatment; expand staffing and funding for the “Vet Centers,” and restructure the benefits claim process at the Veterans Benefit Administration.

Although rarely addressed, one other problem faced by 16 percent of veterans – women – is sexual trauma.

“Women veterans are having many sexual-trauma issues,” Helwig said. “It’s much higher than their male counterparts. The military plays that down, but the result is we’re treating more and more of them.”

Helwig praised George Marnell, director of the local Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, for being “a magician” at juggling his budget to provide care. But it hasn’t been enough.

Through a collaboration with 14 agencies and Presbyterian Medical Services, the state has provided crisis-intervention telehealth program for veterans and their families, which includes a walk-in center at PMS’s Rio Rancho site.

“We’re expanding that this year and opening new offices in Farmington and Cuba,” Helwig said. “Next year, we expect to open ones all over New Mexico. We’re trying to fill the gaps the federal government can’t take care of.”

Through its Web site, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America attempts to direct people to even more assistance.

Returning veterans are guaranteed health care – a benefit that sometimes pushes veterans of other wars further down the priority list. They can also take advantage of expanded education stipends that in some cases extend to their children.

In his visits to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Helwig has seen the consequences of carnage. But he’s also seen hope.

“One positive thing is that they seem to be coping with their disabilities and working through them,” he said. “Another is the fact that they are so focused on their dreams. These are 19- and 20-year-old kids right out of high school. But they seem to still have a grasp on how important their dreams are.”

Today, Helwig will be among the state’s veterans paying respect to their fellow men and women who came home — and the ones who could not.

Going forward, he hopes the Obama administration will change the way the nation funds veterans’ health care to avoid potential crises like the one two years ago where the bank nearly ran dry midway through the fiscal year. Besides compromising care for existing veterans, such by-the-book budgeting threatens to cut out spikes in the growing needs of new veterans.

“The spike right now,” he said, “is war.”