There really is a bear on the loose

Libya is spinning out of control, and the Levant, which includes Syria, Israel and the Gaza Strip, is a mess.  This has bled over the border into Iraq, and who knows what Iran, the next country over, is going to do.  Next door to Iran, Afghanistan’s election victor has not been declared, so the specter of a failed government and a failing state haunts us, and we just don’t know if Pakistan is a friend or a foe. 

And let’s not forget Ukraine, just to the north.

I’m not going to make a case on how we have vital national interests in this swirl – if you don’t already know that you should go read a couple of books instead of reading my blog -but despite these interests the West, and the United States in particular, remain frozen. 

Pundits rail, talking heads foam at the mouth, neoconservatives have taken to the airwaves again, and Senator McCain wants us to adopt a more aggressive posture in lots of places.

Still, nothing happens.  Polls show that the American people seem to agree with the lack of action, and the chattering class should reflect on opinion.  Perhaps we’re a lot smarter than the smart people think we are.

There is indeed a bear on the loose, only it’s not the President wandering around in a Denver pool hall.  It is a positively evil man named Vladimir Putin.  His fingers are in all of this.  So, why not take on the bear?  We are a superpower, aren't we?

We still have thousands of troops in Afghanistan, and the only ground routes out transit Russia, Iran, or Pakistan.  We can’t go through Iran, we can’t trust Pakistan because they’ve closed the border to us not that long ago, so we can’t afford to anger Putin.

In 1948, along with Brits we did the Berlin Airlift to bring food and coal to West Berlin to break the blockade.  Today, it’s much easier for Putin to drop a blockade across most of Europe, not just Berlin, on energy, and he doesn’t have to use any troops.  He just shuts off the gas pipeline.  Once again, we can’t afford to anger Putin.

We may think we won the space race decades ago, but somehow we conceded the high ground and we are now vulnerable.  Russia builds the rocket engines that deliver U.S. military satellites into space.  According to DoD Buzz, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened in May to cut off sales of the RD-180 engines following the announcement of sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S, and the threat is still hanging over our head.  We have something like a dozen of these engines in stock, and rely on Russia to keep the flow going.

So, perhaps the American people are pretty shrewd.

While it may seem like a good idea to ask Vladimir to step out into the parking lot an old-fashioned American roadhouse whupping, that’s a fight that may cost us dearly.  The logistics tail is wagging the dog, at a strategic level.  We may not like it, but we have to accept reality, even when it stinks.  That’s what logisticians do.

It’s no different from what happens to us in our day-to-day work.  We may not like the new dimensional rules that are coming down for freight rates, but we can’t fight it in the near term.  In the long term options are infinite, but people like us are realists and we live in the here and now.

Mark Twain once said, ““God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”  It seems that the American people have.  Now we can only hope that the politicians and pundits do the same.