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When a nation of laws goes to war, their laws go with them. In a decade and a half of fighting terrorism, the laws that define our actions overseas and at home have morphed as the threat and strategy for dealing with it has. From fighting ISIS, operating with and in failed states, dealing with the expanding "refugee crisis," to keeping the balance between security and safety - what has the legal shop been up to? Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern is returning guest Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., Major General, USAF (Ret.), Professor of the Practice of Law, and Executive Director, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University. General Dunlap’s teaching and scholarly writing focus on national security, international law, civil-military relations, cyberwar, airpower, counter-insurgency, military justice, and ethical issues related to the practice of national security law.
Join us live if you can with the usual suspects in the chat room and offer up your questions for our guest, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
Hopefully some time this week you have already run by this story - if not I wanted to make sure at least everyone on the front porch knew this man's name. It is one thing to say that you would do this-or-that in a certain circumstance from the comfort of your kitchen table. It is another thing to be out in the open, unarmed, at the mercy of the merciless, and do the right thing. It also speaks to the character of a man to do something such as this, and then keep it to himself. He didn't brag about it. He didn't try to make a career out of it. He didn't try to make himself anything more than what he was; an honorable man doing only what he hoped others would do for him.
Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds of the US 422nd Infantry Regiment was the senior officer in the American section of the Stalag IXA prisoner of war camp.
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“I would estimate that there were more than 1,000 Americans standing in wide formation in front of the barracks with Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds standing in front, with several senior non-coms beside him, of which I was one,” Tanner said.
“There was no question in my mind, or that of Master Sergeant Edmonds, that the Germans were removing the Jewish prisoners from the general prisoner population at great risk to their survival.
“The US Army’s standing command to its ranking officers in POW camps is that you resist the enemy and care for the safety of your men to the greatest extent possible,” Tanner said.
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When Nazi guards demanded all Jewish prisoners report the following morning, in a move reminiscent of the movie Spartacus, Edmonds instructed all soldier inmates in the camp to show up alongside their Jewish comrades.
When camp commandant Major Siegmann saw the entire American contingent standing and identifying as Jews he exclaimed, “they cannot all be Jews,” and Edmonds replied, “we are all Jews.”
Siegmann then drew his pistol on Edmonds, who coolly responded that “according to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank and serial number. If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us, and after the war you will be tried for war crimes.”
Outfaced by Edmonds, the commandant turned and walked away.
Lester Tanner, one of the Jewish POWs Edmonds had save, said of his brave commander: “He did not throw his rank around. You knew he knew his stuff and he got across to you without being arrogant or inconsiderate. I admired him for his command.
“We were in combat on the front lines for only a short period, but it was clear that Roddie Edmonds was a man of great courage who led his men with the same capacity we had come to know him in the States,” Tanner said.
Leadership, clear and simple. Strength is contagious. An act of honor will bring more acts of honors. Fullbore. When the hateful, bigoted, or those who are just following the orders of the hateful and bigoted, come to your command and order you to break your people in to different groups by race, creed, color, religion or national origin for "special treatment" large or small - what is your response? What are the consequences to you for your actions relative to Master Sergeant Edmonds's?
I'll let you figure it out. Did he approve this wording?
FM SECDEF WASHINGTON DC
TO ALDODACT
INFO ZEN/SECDEF WASHINGTON DC
BT
UNCLAS
SUBJ/HALF-STAFFING OF THE NATIONAL FLAG
ALDODACT 14/15
ADDRESSEES PASS TO ALL SUBORDINATE COMANDS
1. AS A MARK OF RESPECT FOR THE VICTIMS OF GUN VIOLENCE PERPETRATED ON DECEMBER 2, 2015, IN SAN BERNARDINO, CALIFORNIA, AND IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL PROCLAMATION OF DECEMBER 2, 2015, THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES SHALL BE FLOWN AT HALF-STAFF UNTIL SUNSET, MONDAY,DECEMBER 7, 2015.
2. THE FLAG SHALL BE FLOWN AT HALF-STAFF ON ALL DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE BUILDINGS, GROUNDS, AND NAVAL VESSELS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD.
RELEASED BY: MICHAEL L. BRUHN, DOD EXECUTIVE SECRETARY
BT
UPDATE: Can we call the attacks on 911 simply an aviation mishap? Sure would make everything easier, wouldn't it?
The broad details are clear what happened in San Bernardino yesterday; we had a radicalized Islamic terrorist attack against unarmed civilians, again with a Saudi connection. We were lucky in that this attack was only ~10% of the death toll in Paris. There will be more attacks. The enemy will use our freedoms against us - freedom of speech on down. That is what you pay for living in a free society. The freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, redress of grievances, to bear arms, secure against unreasonable search - all these things and the other freedoms we enjoy are not the problem. The simple minded will, in an effort not to address the very real human cause, will go after freedoms first. They always do. This attack was not made by the poor, the uneducated, the deprived, or even the foreigner (except for it seems the wife). This was not from a lack of opportunity. No, this had nothing to do with any of that. This had everything to do with evil people encouraged and enabled by a toxic religious movement that, as things go, will continue to grow as a threat. What does one do? First of all, the last 24-hrs have been useful to help identify which public figures are the most crass, petty, and part of the problem instead of the solution. If you read someone "prayer shaming" - then you have your sign. If, in a state with some of the most restrictive gun laws (even stricter Paris gun laws didn't help either) - you have people press "send" on their prepared response in support of stronger gun laws while the spent cartridges were still warm - then you have your sign. Those are not well meaning people who are worth your time. They are not honest brokers. They represent the worst of blind agenda driven mindlessness, and they will get more of us killed. Though uncomfortable to address, there is this simple truth - this Long War is global, international, and is not going anywhere. If you think bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants from already radicalized nations will decrease these attacks, you are wrong. If you think talking about climate change will decrease this slaughter, you are delusional. If you think the response to an attack by a hostile and foreign socio-political-religious movement is to attack the rights of your own citizens to speak, move, communicate, and defend themselves - then you are worse than wrong - you are providing aid and comfort to the enemy. If you use terrorist attacks for your own petty hobby-horses, you are worth little more than the scorn you so richly deserve. ... and yes, young man - I am speaking to you.
Take some time this AM to read the full interview with LTG Michael Flynn, USA (Ret) at Spiegel. The historical forensics are standard Spiegel, but Flynn manages in the interview to make a few forward looking observations that deserve time to absorb. This little tid-bit is what stands out and needs to be fully understood for those who think this conflict would end if we could just end the Islamic State. No, though that is required, that won't end things. At its core, and its real Strategic Center of Gravity, is its fundamental Islamic foundation. That is real, it can be defended by scripture, and it is universal. Each nation that has a Muslim population has the water for radical Islamists to swim in. 1%, 5%, or 10% of the total Muslim population? It does not matter. As we have seen from Ft. Hood to Paris, it only takes 1, to 2, to 10 people with the will. For at least my lifetime, that is the new reality.
We know from debriefings that they have actually broken Raqqa down into international zones because of language barriers. They have put interpreters in place in those international zones in order to communicate and get their messages around. For example, the Australians alone have about 200 people.
There's even an Australian sector in Raqqa, and they're tied into the other English speakers because not everybody shows up speaking Arabic. This requires a military-like structure with military-like leadership.
These people will go home. They will act. They will influence. They already have. What are our plans to attack and undermine their Strategic CoG? In many of the governments of the West, they won't even recognize that fact. Until they do, then we will not effectively address the issue at the Operational and Tactical level. As a result, this will grow, this will expand. This will not end. The non-Muslim world can contain it, if it has the will. Ultimately, this iteration of radical Islam will have to be defeated within Islam. If that cannot be done, then the West has but one option; quarentine Islam to the areas it presently exists and stop the growth of Muslims importing themselves in to non-Muslim nations to mitigate the depth of the water the terrorists can swim in. History shows us that when it is in a waxing phase, radical Islam will expand and slaughter along its bleeing edge until it finds resistence. If you don't resist, then you become like the former Christian nations of N. Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East who failed to rise to the occasion.
Not a new observation, but Ross Douthat over at NYT takes another swing of trying to understand what is going on in Syria, in part, by looking at the Spanish Civil War;
As with Spain, so now with Syria. Once again we have a divided country bled by an ideological proxy war — this time between the Salafism of the Gulf states and the Twelver Shi’ism of the Iranian regime, with other regional and global powers hovering in the background. Once again we have the escalating atrocities — chemical warfare, massacres and religious persecutions, the return of beheadings, slavery and crucifixion. Once again we have ideologically motivated volunteers rushing in from far and wide; once again we have liberal powers seemingly helpless to bring the conflict to an end.
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One reason Spain’s civil war ended quickly was the sheer effectiveness of the military aid the Axis powers sent to the nationalist cause. Spain proved (or seemed to prove) the effectiveness of total war as a tool of ideologically-motivated statecraft: The left was crushed, Franco’s regime established, and looking from afar Adolf Hitler could draw an obvious lesson for his own terrible ambitions.
In Syria, the lessons are very different. The war is endless, the factions barely competent, and neither of the main ideological forces invested in the conflict seem capable of actually winning it. The Iranian mullahs have helped President Bashar al-Assad survive, but not to prosper. The Gulf states have lost control over their own Sunni proxies, and now face an Islamic State that threatens them as well.
In line with the human cost of the Syrian Civil War, the economic infrastructure and civilization are going backwards. You know that picture of N. Korea vs. S. Korea from space? Via The Economist at the link, they have a Syria before and after that describes another layer to the story.
The latest UN figures obtained by this newspaper (as yet unpublished) show that Syria’s population has shrunk to just 16.6m, down from a pre-war level of around 22m. With 4m UN-registered refugees abroad, at least 1m more unregistered and 7m internally displaced people, more than half the country’s population has been forced to move. UN officials think the number could be significantly higher than that, since estimates of the pre-war population vary widely. One indicator of this is satellite images of night-time electric-light intensity (evidence of human activity) which has fallen over 80% since the start of the war. Up to 250,000 people have died over the same period.
Though a useful reference point for further pondering, the Spanish Civil War is a limited benchmark. What is going on in Syria has become its own particular idiom. There are no "good guys," there are just those who are either a threat to others, or not. The best thing for Syria is to contain the violence so the metastasized portion, ISIS, can be weakened and killed - and done in such a way that the violence does not spread. The difficult part of that is that if there is too much success against ISIS in Syria that is not matched by strength in Iraq, then the problem heads down river to Baghdad. That COA is another post for another day. The only people worthy of our support are the Kurds, but that creates problems with Turkey, which ... well ... there you go. Foreign Entanglements and all that jazz. If the Spanish Civil War does not quite inform sufficiently about Syria, what might add additional perspective? Let's look at another religious and ethnic war as a reference point. The 30-years War;
The Thirty Years War, a multifaceted and multinational political and military conflict that raged over central Europe between 1618 and 1648 has often been considered, at least in the scope of misery and destruction it brought to those experiencing it, as a disaster comparable to, if not greater than, the two world wars and the Black Death. The suffering and heroism of both the combatants and the hapless victims of the fighting has burned itself into the national literatures and historical consciousness of that age and those ages that follow. While information on the extent of the material losses is sketchy, recent scholarship estimates human casualties to be in excess of millions, or about 15 to 20 percent of the prewar population of the region.
Let's take the lower end of that number, 15%. A lot of that was assumed to be disease, something that we have not seen in Syria yet. Let's round that down a bit more to compensate for that, but give account for the fact that modern weapons are a bit more destructive. We'll make it 10%. To get to the 30 Years War level in Syria, we need about 2.2 million dead. Between 9 to 10 times more death than we have had so far. Yes, it can get worse. Smart money is that it will. The model of complexity we are working with? Well ... review your Westeros.
