The Strategic Corporal in Afghanistan

In 1999 Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Krulak wrote an article on “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War.”  It depicts a corporal, the entry level for non-commissioned officers (NCOs), who is equally skilled at leading a squad of a dozen volunteer enlisted Marines in warfighting, in peace-keeping and in humanitarian assistance.

The Three Block War is a metaphor for the environment in which all of these skills may be needed more or less simultaneously.  “In Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia the unique challenges of military operations other-than-war . . . were combined with the disparate challenges of mid-intensity conflict.”  In conflicts like these “Marines may be confronted by the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours and within the space of three contiguous city blocks.”

The reason why the corporal in charge is a Strategic Corporal is that he may at times “be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and …  potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well.”

It’s a lot to ask of a 19-22-year-old corporal with 2-3 years of service.  All the more so since generals also expect NCOs to “be able to read the cultural terrain” like majors and colonels.

Afghanistan may not be the kind of Three Block War General Krulak had in mind, but it certainly involves military operations other-than-war since the US is engaged in a counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign (even if we’ve stopped calling it that) to win the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians as we suppress what we regard as an insurgency by the militant Islamic Taliban faction.  Think of it as a Two Block War.

But in this war where every soldier or Marine has a cell phone with camera and texting and 24/7 connection to the Internet, we are far more likely to hear about bad symbols of US foreign policy than good ones.  To mention one of the worst, in March 2012 Robert Bales, an Army staff sergeant and family man with a good record and three prior combat tours in Iraq, left his base one night and murdered 16 Afghan men, women and children.

To the Afghans, however, the carelessness of  US military authorities in burning copies of the Koran in its possession was even more horrendous.  If their violent reaction surprised you as it did me, we both obviously need help reading the cultural terrain.

Is this just war as it always has been?  Is Afghanistan just Vietnam for slow learners?  

I see differences.  One is that many of the troops who fought in Vietnam were draftees.  The protests of their family and friends and veterans and sympathizers back home became noisy and raucous as the war continued without apparent progress for eight years.  To derail such opposition, President Nixon let the draft expire, and we’ve fought every war since with all-volunteer forces (AVF).  Although the Afghan war has gone on without apparent progress longer than Vietnam, there are few protests.  The public is unengaged.

So is Congress.  Current defense budgets are higher in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars than at any time since World War II, including the Vietnam years, but we have fewer combat brigades (look inside this book) because fewer budget dollars trickle down to the AVF.  So to fight two smaller-than-Vietnam wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has had to resort to multiple combat deployments, not only of regular forces but also of reserve and National Guard units.  How do reserve and Guard members hold a job when every third year they’re called back into active duty?

Another difference is in the nature of combat.  Mines and booby traps are part of every war, but in Iraq and now in Afghanistan it’s as if they’ve taken it over, at least in the minds of the AVF on the ground.  Their name, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suggests how easy they are to make and install, and indeed they’re encountered in every block of the Two Block War.  IEDs also cause injuries that may be worse than the military is prepared to recognize or knows how to treat.  Inadequately treated, the trauma may be exacerbated by the strains of successive combat deployments.  How else to understand what Sergeant Bales did?

A fourth difference is that Vietnam never had any strategic justification other than the domino theory, which was based on serious misreading of the cultural terrain in Southeast Asia and, for that matter, in world communism.  Afghanistan, by contrast, had a clear justification: attacking Al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11, and denying them their safe haven under the Taliban.

But today Al Qaeda is in hiding across the Afghanistan border in Pakistan with many of its leaders killed, including its founder, Osama bin Laden, and others hounded by aerial drones and commandos.  It has no safe haven under the Taliban (whose leaders are also in hiding) or anywhere in Afghanistan.  Nor has it successfully attacked the US since 9/11.

Our war with the Taliban has now come to resemble Vietnam—without apparent progress or strategic purpose—and is impairing both the health and morale of the AVF.  It is time to end the former and restore the latter.  Given our refusal to deal with the greater threats of global warming, as another Marine general warned, we’re going need the AVF for other wars.

Annulling Healthcare?

It seems unreal that the Supreme Court might kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the grounds that requiring everyone who can afford health care insurance to have it by 2014 or pay a compensatory penalty is unconstitutional.  Although Congress can regulate health care and insurance under the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress “To regulate Commerce . . . among the several States,” a majority of five justices may decide that the individual mandate (as the requirement is called) isn’t included in that power.

ACA is complex, but its purpose is clear – and clearly tied up with the individual mandate.  In an e-book I recently published, Vote 99 Percent, which is about key issues that voters in 2012 need to understand, I undertook to explain the gist of each issue in 200-300 words.  Here’s what I wrote about ACA:

The purpose of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, most of which doesn’t take effect until 2014, is to provide American citizens and legally resident aliens with access to affordable health care through affordable health care insurance.  People who can’t obtain affordable insurance through an employer and don’t qualify for Medicaid will be guaranteed access to insurance through new health benefit exchanges, with subsidies for those with low income.

Uninsured people who can’t afford health care when they have to have it are often treated at public cost in hospital emergency rooms.  Under ACA they will also be able to obtain insurance at normal rates since insurers will no longer be able to deny coverage or charge more because of current illness or preexisting medical conditions.  But letting people avoid buying insurance until they’re sick increases the insurance risk and its cost for everyone else.  To minimize these costs, ACA’s “individual mandate” requires almost everyone who can afford insurance to have it by 2014 or pay an annual penalty.

Since ACA defers to our current for-profit health insurance system rather than replacing it with a single government payer like Medicare, which insures seniors, ACA’s version of universal health care is less efficient and more expensive than in other industrialized countries like Canada.  But along with Medicare and safety-net programs like Medicaid, ACA will be as vital to the economic security of the 99% as Social Security.

Congress should not eliminate or privatize or cut back on any of these programs.

                                                                —

Insurance companies control their risks by excluding people with higher risks of illness either by denying them coverage in the first place or by capping the amount of their coverage or canceling their policies when they get sick.  ACA will eliminate these practices, thereby increasing the risk and consequently the cost of insurance.  But requiring healthy people to buy insurance will lower the risk and cost of insurance, offsetting in some measure the increased risk and cost of covering less healthy people.

That’s the essential scheme of ACA—finance the cost of extending health care to high-risk people who really need it but can’t get it without ACA by creating the individual mandate.  Universal health care means everyone’s in, and taxes on insurance and pharmaceutical companies and wealthier individuals will subsidize health care for poorer people who can’t afford to buy insurance.

For the Supreme Court to decide that buying health care insurance is part of interstate commerce that Congress can regulate but not buying insurance is not part of interstate commerce would be truly bizarre.  All the more so since universal health care could be achieved by expanding Medicare to cover everyone and financing the additional coverage through payroll taxes.  Doing so would rely on Congress’ Constitutional power to lay and collect taxes to provide for the general welfare, the power that Congress exercised when it created Social Security and Medicare in its present form.  Everyone is taxed, so wouldn’t need an individual mandate—or for that matter private health insurance.

During oral argument the most senior associate justice on the court suggested that if the power to regulate interstate commerce justified the individual mandate, it could justify anything, including making people buy broccoli.  “Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food.  Therefore, everybody is in the market.  Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.”

Well, maybe.  But since the price of commodities like broccoli is largely determined (in the absence of scarcity) by the costs of producing and distributing them, making everyone buy them isn’t likely to lower their price very much.  But the price of health insurance is determined by the health risks that determine when (if ever), how often and how much money the insurer will have to pay out.  Adding healthy people to the insured pool lowers its health risks and therefore its price.

Economists understand this, and indeed the leading expert on the individual mandate is MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.  He estimates that losing the individual mandate would reduce the number of currently insured people who will be covered by ACA from 32 million to 8 million and perpetuate “our unfair individual insurance markets in a world where employer-based insurance is rapidly disappearing.”

Economists understand the difference between health insurance and broccoli, but if five of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court don’t, ACA will be gutted.  We’ll find out in June.