Libyan War

You Know Who’s Not Hot on Military Action in Libya? The Pentagon

·    By Spencer Ackerman , March 1, 2011  

·    Categories: Tactics, Strategy and Logistics

Put the brakes on any suspected war plans for Libya. The military’s leadership just issued a giant caution against interfering in the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

Neither Defense Secretary Robert Gates or Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, objected to any military action President Obama might order. And Gates said he was ordering the amphibious ship Kearsarge and the amphibious transport Ponce into the Mediterranean, with their “emergency evacuation and humanitarian relief” capabilities. Notice that Gates played down their offensive capabilities.

And Gates conspicuously didn’t order the aircraft carrier Enterprise, currently floating in the Red Sea, into the Mediterranean. An aircraft carrier would obviously give more options to Obama as a staging ground for launching a no-fly zone over Libya, something that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says is a possibility. Indeed, Gates and Mullen did everything they could to temper talk of a no-fly without actually opposing it.

There’s no United Nations mandate for taking any action, Gates said, and there’s “no unanimity within NATO” for military intervention. “The kinds of options talked about in the press and elsewhere” — i.e., a no-fly zone — “have their own consequences and second, third order effects, so they have to be considered very carefully.” As does U.S. military action in “another country in the Middle East” while the Iraq and Afghanistan wars continue.

Mullen, just back from a seven-country trip to the region — which coincided with fierce, if brief, violence by the U.S.-allied government of Bahrain against its protesters — warned that a no-fly zone is an “extraordinarily complex operation to set up.” He said that if ordered to establish one, the military would need to look at “a safe manner” for doing so, a reference to Libya’s air defenses. You can read about those courtesy of my colleague David Axe.

But Gates repeatedly stated he wasn’t going to limit Obama’s options, and that’s why he ordered the Kearsarge and Ponce’s movement. Since 1400 Marines from the Kearsarge are in Afghanistan, another 400 U.S.-based Marines will link up with the ship, Gates said. And asked if he might at some point recommend sending an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, Gates responded with the very Gates-like, “We’re looking at all options and a variety of contingencies.”

None of that stopped Gates and Mullen from listing al-Qaeda and Iran as the ultimate losers of the Mideast uprisings, which Mullen quipped were “moving at the speed of Twitter.” And they had no real criticisms of the authoritarian regimes allied with the U.S., like Yemen, which is seeing its own explosions of protests currently, or Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose “reforms” Gates encouraged.

But consider the Pentagon’s leadership unconvinced about the wisdom of U.S. military action in Libya. Usually when a U.S. defense official talks about a dearth of unanimity within NATO, he’s referring to European reluctance to a military endeavor. This afternoon, Gates was all but describing himself as the holdout.

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