US Defense Secretary Gates wants Spy Agencies to focus on Hearts and Minds instead of killing insurgents

Gates backs critique of spy agencies in Afghanistan
Adam Entous
WASHINGTON Reuters
Thu Jan 7, 2010 11:11pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates threw his support on Thursday behind a harsh critique of the U.S. military's spy agencies in Afghanistan, increasing pressure on them to shift focus from killing insurgents to winning hearts and minds.

The rare public critique by U.S. Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, put a spotlight on what some American officials describe as a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war within the U.S. military and intelligence community over priorities.

In his report, Flynn described U.S. intelligence officers and analysts in Afghanistan as "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced ... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers."

While the U.S. military's focus has shifted under President Barack Obama to mounting a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at sidelining the Taliban by winning over the Afghan people, Flynn said the intelligence community was instead still focused on capturing and killing mid- to high-level insurgents.

U.S. hunt-and-kill operations on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, frequently using unmanned aerial drones armed with missiles, have been condemned by human rights groups and have fueled anti-American sentiment.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Gates found Flynn's analysis "brilliant" and his findings "spot on."

But Morrell said Gates had "real reservations about the general's choice of venue for publication." Flynn's report was issued on Monday by a private Washington think tank, surprising Pentagon officials.

Some saw it as a breach of the established military chain of command and an unusually public flogging of intelligence agencies that Flynn is meant to lead in Afghanistan.

Flynn said in his report that he had directed intelligence officers and analysts to gather more information on a wider range of issues at a grass-roots level, as well as to divide their work along geographical lines.

Pentagon officials said the report was aimed at intelligence agencies overseen by the Defense Department, and not the CIA, which has overseen strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"This is internal criticism. It is not directed at our colleagues elsewhere in the intelligence community," Morrell said.

Release of the report came less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, the second-most deadly attack in agency history.

Al Qaeda's Afghan wing claimed responsibility for the bombing on Thursday, saying it was launched to avenge the deaths of the group's leaders. Some of them were killed in CIA drone strikes.

An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, defended the focus of U.S. spy agencies on insurgents, saying: "You can't be successful at counterinsurgency without a profound understanding of the enemy."

(Editing by Anthony Boadle and Eric Beech)

F-22 Raptor, Greatest Fighter Ever

The F-22 is the most advanced and capable fighter in the world. It needs to be built and deployed because we cannot afford to have someone else (China) build it and deploy against us. That is a simple inelegant fact of life. Secretary Gates thinks differently:

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Air Force shakeup may spur spending shifts

Sun Jun 8, 2008 11:53am EDT
By Jim Wolf - Analysis Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ouster of the Air Force's top two officials may spur even more Pentagon spending on equipment for current wars and end production of pricey F-22 jets designed for potential conflicts with countries such as China.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates forced the resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley on Thursday after gaffes involving nuclear and missile security.

The Air Force's accidental shipping of ballistic-missile fuses to Taiwan may have been the last straw amid strains over acquisition priorities, remotely piloted vehicles and other friction about post-Iraq needs, experts on the military said.

Starting months ago, Gates had singled out the Air Force's top-of-the-line Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) F-22 Raptor fighter jet as a prime example of what he deemed misplaced military priorities.

"The reality is we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theatre," Gates told a Senate committee in February. He later urged all the services to send more remotely piloted planes, such as General Atomics' Predator, to the battlefield, a step that feeds surveillance video to troops in real time.

Under Wynne and Moseley, the Air Force had sought to buy 381 radar-evading F-22s -- more than twice as many as the 183 budgeted by the Defense Department. The F-22 costs more than $132 million apiece.

Dov Zakheim, who retired as the Pentagon's chief financial officer in 2004, said the Air Force shake-up would prompt the Army, Navy and Marine Corps to rethink their big-ticket acquisition plans as well to make sure they met Gates' goals.

"What just happened underscores the secretary's concern that the (Defense) department pursue programs that are most relevant to the kinds of wars that he expects the United States to continue to fight," Zakheim said in a telephone interview.(more here)

Gates Wakes Up the US Air Force

Is Managing the Chinese Giant Wishful Thinking?

As China becomes richer, it is becoming more nationalistic. A blunt glimpse of that was apparent over the recent Olympic Torch protests. The Chinese public was genuinely angry over world reaction. There is no significant sign that this trend will not continue.

As China gets richer, it also becomes more dependent on foreign sources of materials and energy. It will need an ever expanding military to protect the unimpeded access to those sources. The world has seen this lethal combination many times in the past. Secretary Gates has noticed:

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Gates Warns China Not to Bully Region on Energy

By ERIC SCHMITT New York Times
Published: May 31, 2008

SINGAPORE — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued a set of thinly veiled warnings to China on Saturday, cautioning that it could risk its share of further gains in Asia’s economic prosperity if it bullied its neighbors over natural resources in contested areas like the South China Sea.

Three years ago at the same lectern here, Mr. Gates’s predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, bluntly criticized China’s swift military buildup. Last year Mr. Gates struck a more conciliatory tone, saying Beijing and Washington had a chance to “build trust over time.”

Mr. Gates seemed to take a third approach in his remarks to a major regional Asia security conference here, seeking to lay down clear markers of continued American commitments to the region while also obliquely criticizing China.

He said that in his four trips to Asia since becoming defense secretary 18 months ago, several countries had expressed concern about “the security implications of rising demand for resources” (translation: China’s voracious quest for new sources of energy) and about “coercive diplomacy” (translation: China’s contested claims of resource-rich territorial waters).

Mr. Gates said there were rewards for playing by an international set of rules in a transparent way. “We should not forget that globalization has permitted our shared rise in wealth over recent decades,” he said. “This achievement rests above all on openness: openness of trade, openness of ideas, and openness of what I would call the ‘common areas’ — whether in the maritime, space, or cyber domains.”

The secretary specifically praised Beijing twice, noting that he had recently set up a telephone hot line with his Chinese defense counterpart and that the American-backed, six-party negotiations intended to temper North Korea’s nuclear ambitions “would not be possible without China’s valued cooperation.”

Otherwise, Mr. Gates spoke in a diplomatic code that his senior aides said would be clearly understood not only in Beijing but also in other Asian capitals and by the hundreds of security experts attending the annual regional conference sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Mr. Gates and his aides had debated just how blunt he ought to be in his address, which opened the Saturday session. In the end, aides said, he accepted the argument that taking a more direct approach would play to Beijing’s advantage and that a subtler, more indirect tack would win more support among Asian allies.

In the speech he recalled disputes in the mid-1990s between China and its neighbors over competing boundary and resource claims in the South China Sea, tensions that have resurfaced among China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

“We urged then, as we do today, the maintenance of a calm and nonassertive environment in which contending claims may be discussed and, if possible, resolved,” he said.

Mr. Gates, as he did last year at the conference, said that the United States “seeks more openness in military modernization in Asia. Transparency enhances confidence and reduces competitive spending.”

He also delivered a scolding reference to China’s unannounced destruction of a satellite in January 2007 when he described how the Pentagon handled a similar situation much differently in February, alerting others before shooting down a failing satellite over the Pacific just before it tumbled uncontrollably to Earth carrying toxic fuel.

Lt. Gen. Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of the general staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army, pushed back during his speech, saying that China was not engaged in an arms race and that its military spending, compared with other sectors of its economy, was “limited and proportional.” In a clear reference to America’s plan to build missile defense systems, General Ma said deploying such defenses “was not helpful” to regional stability.

Mr. Gates made clear that central to the Bush administration’s Asia policy is maintaining American military might and economic sway in the region.

Indeed, Mr. Gates’s first stop on his weeklong visit to Asia was to Guam, where he took a helicopter tour on Friday to review Pentagon plans to spend $15 billion over the next six years to upgrade and expand World War II-era installations to accommodate thousands of additional American troops, and to broaden training missions with regional partners like Japan.

He said Saturday that Washington’s policy also focused on empowering regional allies to defend themselves by strengthening their armed forces and by building more robust economies and open political systems.

This policy is almost sure to endure no matter which party wins the White House in the November election, he said.

He showed an unusual flash on anger in response to a question after his speech about American efforts to deliver relief to cyclone victims in Myanmar, saying the United States has tried 15 times to get the Burmese leadership to allow more foreign assistance, but to no avail.

“We have reached out, they have kept their hands in their pockets,” he said.