Stanford fellows take hard look at their craft

By DANIEL SNEIDER
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
As military duty goes, a year at Stanford University, taking classes, attending seminars, doing some serious reading, and maybe getting in a round of golf or two, may be as good as it gets.
But the four men who have been national security fellows at the Hoover Institution this past academic year have earned their stay on the Farm. All of them have served in either the Afghan or Iraq wars. They are senior officers with military resumes that stretch from West Point to driving cruisers across the Pacific Ocean and leading Marine infantrymen into combat.
The National Security Fellowship program, which began in 1969 with more than 100 participants to date, is an opportunity to take a breather and reflect on what these professional warriors do for a living. Their research topics are a little different from most Stanford students -- Air Force Lt. Col. Kevin Wooton is focusing on the relationship between air power and special operations in the war on terrorism, for example.
These men -- a soldier, a sailor, an airman and a Marine -- sat down the other day in a sun-dappled Stanford courtyard for coffee and conversation. The talk ranged from the future of warfare to the threat of a rising China, and ended with their encounter with the American university at a time of war.
The war in Iraq, and the continuing mission in Afghanistan, naturally comes first in the minds of these men. In most cases, they confront a very different war from the one they were trained for -- a counterinsurgency campaign where American soldiers operate in small units against a hidden enemy and where victory may be measured in how many people come out to vote rather than in body counts.
Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager came to Stanford from Kabul, where he spent a year as the political-military chief of the U.S. forces there. "This is definitely something different than I anticipated when I came in," Mansager recounted. He spent his West Point years studying the Soviet Union, preparing to fight the Red Army in massive battles across Central Europe. "They were the bad guys."
Irregular warfare
The Marines have always been about irregular warfare and fighting in small units, Marine Lt. Col. Daniel Yoo said, with no small amount of pride. But Yoo, a trim man who served in Afghanistan, acknowledges that wars like this are not popular in the military.
"Counterinsurgency is a bad word," he said. "The leadership that's in charge now lived through Vietnam. It's a tough operation to be successful at. Counterinsurgency is protracted. We want the quick victory."
War, as the classic formula goes, is a continuation of politics. But that is even more true when it comes to guerrilla wars, all these men agreed.
"The only time counterinsurgency has been successful is when you are able to split the population from the insurgents," observed Wooton, who was an intelligence officer in Iraq. "The military is usually not the ones who do that."
Afghanistan is different from Iraq, said Yoo. In Afghanistan, a lot more people stopped fighting "because it was in their own interest," Yoo said, suggesting that might not be the case in Iraq.
Though the Middle East remains their preoccupation, that is not necessarily the threat these men expect to face down the road.
"The greatest risk five or 10 years out is China thinking a Taiwan invasion is possible," said Lt. Cmdr. Scott Tait, a boyish-looking naval officer with extensive experience on cruisers and destroyers from the Pacific and Indian oceans to the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea.
"We're very Asia-centered," Yoo said. "China is already becoming a regional competitor." The Marines are still likely to find themselves fighting in the Middle East over the next decade, he added, but they will keep "a jaundiced eye out on Asia."
Radical Islam
The Army's Mansager also sees China as a potential threat but believes that radical Islam will continue to top the list for a while.
Wooton, who is a career intelligence officer with experience in the Pacific and in Southwest Asia, cautioned that conflict with China is by no means inevitable. The biggest danger is "mirror-imaging," where both countries tend to read the other through their own lens, failing to take into account different histories and cultures. "If conflict comes, it will come as a result of miscalculation," he warned.
These men will be leaving Stanford soon -- headed to assignments varying from a stint in the Pentagon to a guided-missile cruiser. Mansager is gently ribbed by his comrades, however, for getting the prize job. He moves a short drive down the coast to Monterey, where he will head the Defense Language Institute, the military's premier site for training men and women to speak languages from Arabic to Korean.
Appreciation
Some lessons at Stanford didn't come in a lecture hall. The Navy's Tait spoke warmly of an encounter with a student in a sociology class wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara. From this student and others, the men heard opposition to the Iraq war but not to the military itself. "The most jarring thing for me has been the appreciation of what we do," he said. "I didn't expect that here."
Air Force officer Wooton comes away from Stanford with a more painful realization. "The government says we are at war," he said. "My family and friends are at war. But most of the folks I meet here day in and day out -- they're not at war."
X Daniel Sneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.