Secretary of State John F. Kerry, left, confers with Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel during testimony on U.S. military intervention in Syria before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Credit: public domain

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 25 2014 (IPS)

Signalling a somewhat more modest global U.S. military posture, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel Monday called for sharp reductions in the size of the U.S. Army, the service that has borne the brunt of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan over the past dozen years.

At the same time, however, he urged an increase in the size of the Special Operations Forces (SOF), the elite military personnel charged with training foreign counterparts and carrying out often-secret missions, including assassinations and raids such as the one that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.The cuts not only reflected the end of U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the aversion to the prolonged commitment of ground troops in foreign countries.

Speaking a week before President Barack Obama is due to unveil his 2015 budget request, Hagel said he will also ask Congress to phase out key weapons systems, including the fabled Cold War-era U-2 spy plane, which will be replaced by drone aircraft, and A-10 “Warthog” jets that have been used for several decades to provide close-air support for ground forces.

“This is a time for reality,” Hagel said told reporters during a press briefing in which he asked Congress to approve 496 billion dollars in military spending for the next fiscal year.

That does not include an additional 26 billion dollars approved for the Pentagon by Congress as part of an “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” budget deal late last year.

“This is a budget that recognises the reality of the magnitude of our fiscal challenges, the dangerous world we live in, and American military’s unique and indispensable role in the security of this country and in today’s volatile world.”

The proposed cuts to the Army captured the national media headlines. Under Hagel’s proposal, which has been endorsed by the chiefs of the four major services, the active-duty Army would be cut from the current 522,000 troops to between 440,000 and 450,000. That would bring the Army to its smallest size since the eve of Washington’s entry into World War II.

The implications of such a cut were not lost on observers who noted that they not only reflected the end of U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the aversion, apparently shared by the Obama administration and the general public alike, to the prolonged commitment of ground troops in foreign countries.

Washington withdrew all of its forces from Iraq in 2011 and plans to withdraw all but a few thousand from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

Just three weeks ago, a Pew Research Centre poll found that, for the first time, majorities (52 percent) of U.S. respondents have concluded that Washington had “mostly failed” to achieve its goals in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Fewer than four in 10 agreed with the notion that the U.S. had “mostly succeeded” in both countries.

“Since we are no longer sizing the force for prolonged stability operations,” Hagel, who served in the Army in the Vietnam War, said Wednesday, “an Army of (the current) size is larger than required to meet the demands of our defence strategy.…As we end our combat mission in Afghanistan, this will be the first budget to fully reflect the transition [the Defence Department] is making after 13 years of war – the longest conflict in our nation’s history.”

“In saying that, he was essentially acknowledging the fact that the American public won’t stand for that kind of intervention any time soon,” William Hartung, a veteran defence analyst at the dovish Centre for International Policy (CIP). “A majority of them understand that spending trillions of dollars and losing thousands of lives in those wars have not made anyone safer.”

“The real question is whether we can roll back the ‘go anywhere, fight any battle’ mentality of the Pentagon,” Hartung added in an email exchange. “Whether it’s drones, Special Forces, or precision bombs, war is war, and it’s time to take the United States off of a perpetual war footing and craft a truly defensive military force.”

Indeed, in his remarks, Hagel stressed that Washington’s SOF will continue to grow – from roughly 66,000 today to just shy of 70,000 in 2015 – an increase of almost 300 percent compared to just a decade ago.

Each of the military services and each of the regional commands (SouthCom for Latin America, Africom for Africa, CentCom for the Near East and parts of South and Central Asia, and PaCom for the Asia-Pacific) – have their own elite SOF units.

In addition, a North Carolina-based Special Operations Command (SOCOM), presided over by Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the bin Laden raid, can dispatch troops to virtually anywhere in the world. He also commands the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in carrying out highly classified operations against specific targets.

McRaven, whose efforts at easing human-rights restrictions on training foreign militaries and circumventing State Department oversight of some aid programmes have proved controversial, has nonetheless been effective in building his “empire” in major part  because of its compatibility with Obama’s desire to lighten the U.S. military’s “footprint” in conflicted regions without reducing its effectiveness and lethality.

“In his State of the Union address, the President declared that our nation must move off a permanent war footing, and Secretary Hagel’s speech today took one major step in that direction.” noted Miriam Pemberton, another defence analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies here. “But, while long-term occupations are off the table now, the expansion of Special Forces means that under-the-radar invasion are not.”

Ironically, Hagel’s budget proposal reflects in many ways the strategic vision of former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who strongly favoured the development of high-tech combat systems, heavy reliance on air power, and small, nimble ground forces who could strike from so-called “lily pads” (or temporary bases) anywhere on the globe within a short period of time. His so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs,” or RMA, however, was side-tracked enormous costs of the Iraq occupation.

The Obama administration has revived that vision, without explicitly admitting it, with the priority it has accorded to cyber-warfare capabilities, SOF, ever-more sophisticated drone technology, its intended retention of all 13 aircraft carriers, and its ongoing efforts to negotiate access agreements to foreign military facilities, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, East African, and Sahelian regions.

Hagel’s proposal will now be taken up by Congress, which is certain to resist a number of its components, including proposed base closures and the phase-out of weapons systems that provide jobs in key legislative districts around the country.

Hagel’s proposal also ignored the across-the-board budget-slashing cuts mandated by law under the so-called “sequester” that took effect in 2013 and continues in force pending further legislative action. They would require the Pentagon to cut an additional 115 billion dollars from its budget over the next five years.

At the height of the Iraq war in 2006, Washington accounted for about half of global military spending. Its budget has since fallen to just over 40 percent, according to Peter Singer of the Brooking Institution. Under the sequester’s limits, it would decline to about 38 percent.

If it remains in effect, the Pentagon would be forced to mothball one aircraft carrier, further reduce the Army’s size to 420,000, and cut into the Marine force as well, among other cost-saving measures.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Activists are aiming to renew the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Ugandan rebel group made infamous by its ruthless leader Joseph Kony, despite noticeably diminished concern for the issue just months after the release of a controversial yet viral video about the leader.

Seeking to push the anti-LRA movement forward, activists have embarked on a tour across the United States to raise awareness. The most prominent are Father Benoit Kinalegu, a Congolese priest and president of the Dungu-Doruma Diocesan Commission for Justice and Peace, and Sister Angelique Namaika, who runs Dynamic Women for Peace, which provides assistance to female and child victims of the LRA.

Father Benoit and Sister Angelique testified before the U.S. Congress Jun. 19, hoping to maintain awareness in the U.S. of the LRA’s brutality. “Because of their trauma, the refugees and child survivors refuse to go back home as long as Joseph Kony is out in the bush and as long as the war is not over,” Sister Angelique told Congress’s Human Rights Commission.

The Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced even more, such as the South Sudanese refugees above. Credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

“They prefer to die of hunger than to return to their homes.”

In 2004, the BBC estimated the death toll of the LRA’s victims at more than 100,000. And while it is difficult to ascertain exact numbers, thousands more have been brutalised since.

Activists on the ground in Central and East Africa, however, are fairly resourceful, using whatever limited means at their disposal to combat the LRA, including using a high-frequency radio system to try to appeal to LRA soldiers to defect.

“These radios allow us to transfer the information around the world” and the region, Father Benoit explained. Nevertheless, “the number of devices that we have is not enough to cover the area,” he added.

Sister Angelique has been a voice of compassion in the region, trying to provide help to traumatised women and children in the area. “Until now, we have not seen any organisation address this issue because there is a war going on,” she said.

Other activists are calling for more political measures. “We need personal engagement from President Obama,” said Paul Ronan, the co-founder and director of advocacy, for the group Resolve, which works to end the LRA’s atrocities and create peace in affected Central African communities.

“Unfortunately, this administration has been slow in utilising funds,” he said in reference to the allotment of military funds towards the struggle.

In October 2011, the Obama administration deployed approximately 100 U.S. Special Forces agents to Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The U.S. troops mainly served in an advisory role to Ugandan troops in the hunt for Kony and the fight against the LRA.

It was the first time since 2003 that the United States specifically deployed troops to aid in an African conflict. In 2003, President George W. Bush sent a small number of troops—estimated between 500 and 2,000—to assist in the Second Liberian Civil War. (NATO troops intervened in Libya in 2011, although U.S. naval forces were involved in firing Tomahawk missiles at Libya.)

“Our advisers will continue their efforts to bring this madman to justice and to save lives,” Obama said in a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in April. “It’s part of our regional strategy to end the scourge that is the LRA and help realise a future where no African child is stolen from their family, and no girl is raped, and no boy is turned into a child soldier.”

The region has seen some progress, Ronan said, thanks to two factors that have weakened Kony’s grip over the LRA. The first was “the relative isolation of Kony over his senior commanders”. According to Ronan, intelligence places Kony’s location possibly in South Darfur – though if his location were known, he would be dead. The second was the capture in May of senior LRA commander, Caesar Achellam.

Nevertheless, the LRA’s atrocities have not garnered quite the support that the hoopla surrounding it would seem to suggest. The original KONY 2012 video, produced by the advocacy group Invisible Children, went viral, and has been viewed more than 91 million times since March.

Many critics have branded this video as a “slacktivist” – a portmanteau term of “slacker” and “activist”- cause, which has not translated into any prolonged action.

After so much initial interest, support for the cause has subsided. A sequel to the original video, entitled “KONY 2012 Part II: Beyond Famous” boasts comparatively few hits – 2.2 million – since its release in April.

In a report released mid-June about the conflict, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the biggest challenge was providing aid and protection to the war-torn region. “The initiative itself lacks adequate and predictable funding for its operations,” Ban wrote.

“Without the necessary resources, the African Union will be unable to execute this important task fully.”