Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


NONCONVENTIONAL WARFARE….Speculating on what might happen if Robert Gates stays on for a while as Secretary of Defense seems a little frivolous when we don’t even know if Gates is truly in contention for the job, but let’s do a bit of it anyway. Gates has taken the position that the Army should focus almost exclusively on counterinsurgency and irregular warfare in the future, something that Michele Flournoy, who’s heading Obama’s defense transition team, has criticized:

She said the document appropriately emphasizes irregular warfare — focused on terrorists and rogue regimes bent on using insurgency or weapons of mass destruction — but might go too far. “I think irregular warfare is very important, particularly in contrast to preparing solely for conventional warfighting, but it shouldn’t be our only focus,” Flournoy said, adding that countries such as China likely are preparing for “high-end” warfare and attacks involving anti-satellite technologies and cyberspace.

Barron YoungSmith thinks this is going to cause some tension:

If Gates ends up staying on at the Pentagon, he and Petraeus will almost certainly be able to impose these counterinsurgency-oriented priorities on what Flournoy, who has long-standing plans to revamp DoD, hoped would be a top-down review starting from scratch.

I’ll take the other side of this issue. My guess is that the Army’s institutional culture is so dedicated to conventional warfare that even a massive push from Gates and Petraeus in the other direction will turn the battleship only a few degrees. Especially if all this stuff is part of a top-down review (which it will be, since the QDR process will be starting up in 2009), a clear and concentrated focus from the start on nonconventional warfare is probably the only way we’ll make any progress at all. I think I might be on Gates’s side on this.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate