UK slams Iraq War runup; NATO summit faces tall tasks; What next for Syria?; What’s with Russia buzzing US planes?; and a bit more...
British report slams Iraq War runup: What did UK Prime Minister Tony Blair do wrong as U.S. President George W. Bush and his senior national-security team barreled toward invading Iraq in 2003? He failed to insist upon having, you know, a plan for what came next. “Blair did not press President Bush for definitive assurances about US post-conflict plans or set out clearly to him the strategic risk in underestimating the post-conflict challenge and failing adequately to prepare for the task,” reports the Guardian, writing about the so-called Chilcot report, the UK government’s official inquiry into the war.
Blair feared deterioration in U.S.-UK ties more than he feared war waged poorly or even strategic disaster. That was a miscalculation, the report says. While conceding that a refusal to join the invading force would have caused “serious short-term damage to the relationship,” the report notes, “The opposition of France and Germany to the war in Iraq does not appear to have had a lasting impact on the relationships of those countries with the US despite the bitterness at the time.”
What lessons can be drawn? Among them, the report says, is this: “Influence should not be set as an objective in itself. The exercise of influence is a means to an end.”
Tall task for the upcoming NATO summit. “When NATO leaders meet in Warsaw later this week, it will be the most important such gathering since the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago,” writes former U.S. ambassador Ivo Daalder in Defense One. Russia is advancing in the east, chaos is rising in the south, and — still hard to believe — Britain is leaving the EU. “The task of NATO leaders is to put in place policies and processes that respond to this triple challenge to Europe’s security in ways that are clearly understood by the alliance’s adversaries and supported by increasingly restive publics on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a tall task, indeed.” Daalder’s piece is a must-read. Get it, here.
Yet NATO faces its challenges after a two years of solid progress on its twin problem areas of identity and efficacy, writes the Council on Foreign Relations’ Stephen Sestanovich: “Yet amid justified self-congratulation, doubts and divisions will surface at this summit. Some may even detect a third type of identity crisis, one that makes NATO seem, more than anything else, irrelevant to today’s big concerns. The alliance, after all, has been on the sidelines of efforts to cope with refugees or to roll back the self-proclaimed Islamic State…” Read on, here.
And for a more detailed look at post-Brexit national-security implications, here are Frank J. Cilluffo and Sharon L. Cardash in Foreign Affairs: “At risk are operational matters such as data and intelligence sharing. But also in question is something more fundamental: the relationships that allow security services to live and breathe. The United Kingdom, EU, and other partners will now have to redefine their security and intelligence relationships.” That, here.
From Defense One
What comes next after Raqqa and Mosul? Obama is making U.S. special operators and locals do most of the fighting. When ISIS falls, Iraq and Syria need better leaders to keep this from happening again. So, D1 contributor Gayle Tzemach Lemmon wants to know: what’s the plan? Read that, here.
The epic saga of Palantir vs. the Army is gearing up for a big courtroom finish — and no decision will salve the spat’s effect on SecDef’s attempts to woo Silicon Valley to defense work. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker has the story, here.
Welcome to the Wednesday edition of The D Brief by Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1917, the British airship R34 made the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by a lighter-than-air vehicle. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
How many times have Russian pilots flown dangerously close to American warplanes and naval vessels several times in the past year? Military Times’ Oriana Pawlyk counts up the recent events, does a deep dive on both sides’ history and operational procedures, and concludes: “These are not the isolated actions of a few rogue pilots. They are calculated, command-directed actions that are intended not only to harass but to send a message: This is our territory. Keep out.” Read that, here.
Eh, in a few decades, it’ll be Russian drones doing the flybys. Or so it would appear from Popular Science’s “The Jet Fighter of the 2040s Will Be A Stealthy Drone Herder,” which briefly rolls up the state of thinking on the next fighter jets. Europeans are thinking about two-seat jets with a crewman to control a small cloud of unmanned aircraft. That, here.
More immediately, the Russians appear to be gearing up their odd duck of an aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, for an unprecedented mission...off Syria? That how War Is Boring adds up a list of interested clues. Check their math, here.
As long as we’re speculating: “Did China just launch a secret satellite-destroying robot weapon into space? The AoLong-1 is tasked with clearing space debris but some think it will form a swarm of military robots.” That’s from the International Business Times, here.
Finally: a light-hearted look at what happened when Britain crashed America’s birthday party. Viewed a million-plus times on Facebook; see it yourself, here.