As Is The Feeling,
So Is The Result.

In the grasp and design of US Foreign Responsibility and Policy, I have focused on the importance of the Combatant Commands, aka COCOMs.

I have been dissatisfied with both the demarcation and the composition of the present system of COCOMs. I remain so.

While I believe the COCOMs are a national treasure, I believe rationality of their present estate vis-à-vis US Foreign Responsibility and Policy is both incomplete and faulty.

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The inner and most important ponderable regarding affairs shared by the USA and other nations — call them joint affairs — and affairs not shared by the USA and other nations — call them independent affairs — is USA responsibility for those affairs.

Before there can be rational USA Foreign Policy, there must be rational accounting of USA Foreign Responsibility. Until USA Foreign Responsibilities are decided — in both joint and independent affairs — USA Foreign Policy cannot exist otherwise than as paralytic twitching that broadcasts anger and chaos.

Rational accounting of USA Foreign Responsibility binds together accurate awareness of power vectors in domestic and foreign affairs, indomitable commitment to maintaining USA sovereign freedom, and respected deployments of the three assets of USA statecraft: Diplomacy, Finance, War-Fighting.

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Respected deployments is an important caveat in the foregoing sentence. Common usage would have the word effective in place of the word respected. Implied here is that the only effective action is the respected one. Beyond that is findable that the only respected action is the fair one and the only fair action is the self-confident, self-satisfying, self-sacrificing one.

Present COCOMs stand on a mixture of WWII combat AORs (Areas Of Responsibility) and subsequent stakeholder’s fiscal, career, and budgetary turf wars. Pondering USA Foreign Responsibility has been almost squashed by the weight of squabbling over financial, status, and career spoils consequent upon making and executing USA Foreign Policy.

There is no security on this earth, only opportunity.
GA Douglas MacArthur

The concept of National Security — a verbiage akin in verisimilitude to those notorious and irreproducible Unicorn Hearts — has made absurdity rampant in the settlement and execution of USA statecraft in both joint and independent affairs. Effectively removed by a pursuit of National Security is rationality in the apprehension and therefore conduct of USA foreign affairs. Instead, private agendas — rent-seeking — co-opt research, discussion, and budget.

By definition, a stakeholder is interested in their stake. Stakeholders are rent-seekers. Definitionally, they are not an impartial actor. A congeries of stakeholders behaves as Bill Knudsen described a committee: a group of people who individually can get nothing done and together decide nothing can be done.

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As currently constituted, USA COCOMs number eleven:

Seven COCOMs are geography-based, four are function-based. Arguably, SPACECOM is function-based, not geography-based. However, the status of space as one of the five elemental principles — the others being air, fire, water, and earth — ties it to geography primarily rather than secondarily, as phenomenon rather than as epiphenomenon.

The operational fact of any possible COCOM is that it rests on and rises from land, from dirt.

Every possible COCOM is a
land-based command.

Earth is dry land
Water is wet land.
Fire is hot land.
Air is thin land.
Space is silent land.
The army has a post.
The ship has a port.
The ordinance has a depot,
The computer has a desk.
The plane has an airport.
The rocket has a spaceport.
The satellite has a basestation.

Every possible operation
is land-based.

Each COCOM should be geography-based and composed to support the mission of the land-based force. The order of battle of the joint force — and a combined force (multi-nation) if there is one — should prioritize the mission of the land-based force. Air Force is forward artillery and port-to-port transit. Navy is forward artillery and port-to-port transit with an attached land-assault force. Space Force is forward-artillery and force protection.

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Axioms

Rational demarcation of COCOM AOs emerges from rational resolve upon USA Foreign Responsibility.

The goal of USA Foreign Responsibility and Foreign Policy is maintenance of USA sovereign freedom.

USA Foreign Responsibility is a matter about which there must be considerable and durable consensus regarding its rationality, meaning, its suitability for maintaining USA sovereign freedom.

USA Foreign Policy is essentially mutable, expected to respond and mutate with some frequency in response to developments foreign and domestic.

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Propositions

Rational USA Foreign Responsibility is baked into our beginnings and, because of our geography, remains fixed, inviolable. It is:

1. that we defend and protect our Land, our Families, and our Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, by means of quick and decisive force;
2. that we respect and abide the sovereign freedom of other nations so long as they do not harm or threaten harm to ours;
3. that we do not tolerate and will extirpate hegemons, foreign and domestic, basing in the American Hemisphere;
4. that we require fair and reciprocal trade with other nations on pain of war;
5. that we contemplate neither imperial nor colonial acquisitions and will resolve properties that fall to us in consequence of war as we decide in furtherance of our own sovereign national freedom and no other consideration.

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Nowhere in our national beginnings or responsibilities is a requirement to protect or defend a nation, other than our own, who is experiencing hardship, loss, grief, or assault. R2P has been read into our national responsibilities by malicious and otherwise muddle-headed female eisegetes of The Parable of the Good Samaritan. What comes forth as personal counsel to a taunting lawyer is neither scalable to nor meant as direction for affairs of state because states are not persons.

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Expositions

We establish that COCOM demarcations should follow geography in the context of the five national responsibilities just enumerated rather than follow stakeholder interests. Stakeholder interests are stakeholder interests, not national interests.

Taking now that as a given, the question of COCOM demarcations resolves into a question of seas. Water covers seven tenths of the globe:

The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence… For the sea is itself nothing but love and emotion. It is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets has said. Nature manifests herself in it, with her three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. The ocean is the vast reservoir of Nature.

Jules Verne

The seas are the geo-strategic canvas and problem par excellence. They are a land-based problem, not a water-based problem. The reality inside this point and the decisive importance thereof cannot be overstated. What happens on the wet land, the seas, determines what happens on the dry land, the continents. But what happens at the seaports determines what happens on the seas.

To control a sea, a nation or alliance of nations, need only control seaports bordering it. Control of inland areas does not yield control of seas beyond their coastlines. Control of seaports on a coastline does that.

A nation wishing to conduct fair and reciprocal trade upon a sea must ensure seaports bordering that sea do not harbor force inimical to fair and reciprocal trade upon it.

Thus, USA COCOM demarcations, and orders of battle (structural composition) inside them, should conform to the natural, rational contours of semi-closed trading systems indigenous to interfaces of wet and dry land masses, aka seas and coastlines. Coastlines and harbors are the keys to victory at sea and national prosperity through commerce.

Win or you lose.

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gahrie . . . commenting at Instapundit
We are at a pivotal point, and have a real opportunity here. If the Space Force bought some Falcon – 9’s and some Dreamchasers, through a KEW dispenser and some rail guns on the Dreamchasers, we could get rid of the whole current strategic triad. KEWs are much cheaper and cleaner than nukes. We retire the strategic bombers, turn the air force back into a ground support transport service, and give it back to the Army. We retire all of the ICBMs. We stop building supercarriers immediately (and turn the two currently being built into disaster response ships) stop building Boomer subs. As the supercarriers retire or come in for prolonged refit we retire them and replace them with smaller carriers, about Essex class size. The mission of the fleet changes from power projection (the Dreamchasers are doing that now) to sea lane protection. Lots of frigates and destroyers, fewer capital ships.

Many GOs and ADMs some time ago renounced responsibility for strategic considerations, said that strategics were their civilian bosses’ responsibility, wanted to focus on tactics. USN signaled this renunciation by redesigning Carrier Battle Groups (strategics) to Carrier Strike Groups (tactics) and force protection to power projection.

If high command has no strategic responsibility, high command has no reason for being and the command itself has no cohesion. Thus the odium for POTUS Trump emanating from high command. He told them he did not want to go to war with them because they are losers, they do not win [because they do not think or advise regarding strategics]. Were GOs and ADMs doing their job, they would love POTUS Trump just as Americans do. Instead, even before POTUS Trump arrived, US ADMs renounced the US Navy being the US Navy, a US Armed Force, in favor of their personally being promoted, paraded, and pampered.

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Findings

I suggest the way through this Gordian Knot is re-structuring the COCOM system to speed movement of personnel and materiel towards and between harbors, aka battle spaces, that anchor lines of communication anywhere.

• Use the globe’s several geographic systems — each comprising semi-autonomous and internally synergistic natural lines of communication — rather than political or economic arrangements (nation states) to mark off the boundaries of the COCOMs.

• Reduce their number to nine, each geography-based, none function-based.

• Replace NATO with Three Brothers Allegiance Alliance (USA, India, Russia).

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USA COCOM AORs

A US COCOM is an Area Of US Foreign Responsibility
purposed to maintain there US sovereign
freedom of movement.

War is a reaction against restrictions on freedom of movement. Lines of communication are how movement happens across geography whether that is dry (land), wet (sea), hot (desert/glacier), thin (air), or silent (space).

The COCOM system should ground in the globe’s several geographic systems. These geographic systems can be identified from a map of the globe and an accurate awareness of the geography dictating their pathways and passageways.

Political and economic arrangements (nation states) that rest atop the globe’s several geographic systems are mutable and only semi-permanent. COCOMs should protect freedom of movement along lines of communication inside and between the globe’s several geographic systems by maintaining the cleanliness of anchor points (harbors, switching stations) raised alongside those lines of communication.

Protecting or raising political and economic arrangements (nation states) resting atop the globe’s geographic systems is the concern of families comprising those arrangements, not of a USA COCOM.

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On 03 January 2019, I posted under title: COCOMs, INTOs, AGCIN. A compendious post, its purpose and premise stand forth in the opening strophes:

This post will explore structural renovation of US combatant commands, treaty organizations generally, and the so-called United Nations.

The exercise proceeds from the observation that freedom of communication by sea or ocean presses more upon national independence and inter-nation comity than does freedom of communication by land.

Along the way, I suggested that the USA COCOM system look something like this:

• ARCOM (Arctic Ocean plus seas at and above @ 57 degrees north latitude)
• ATLANCOM (Atlantic Oceans)
• CARIBCOM (Caribbean Sea)
• MEDCOM (Mediterranean Sea)
• TRECOM (Adriatic, Black, Baltic Seas)
• PACOM (Pacific and Southern Oceans plus Arafura, Coral, and Tasman Seas)
• CASCOM (Coastal Asian Seas: Okhotsk, Japan, East China, Philippine, South China)
• IACOM (Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea)

The word something signaled that further thought by me was required and would be forthcoming.

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In consideration of the foregoing, I suggest now that the USA COCOM system look something like this:

1- ARCOM

Lands bordering the Arctic Ocean and contiguous waters north of 57 degrees north latitude.

2- TRECOM

Lands bordering the Adriatic, Black, and Baltic Seas.

3- MEDCOM

Lands bordering the Mediterranean and Red Seas plus the Gulfs of Oman, Persia, and Aden.

4- CASCOM

Lands comprising the Inner Asian, Mongoloid, hot (desert/glacier) land: from Armenia/Azerbaijan on a line through the Caspian Sea, to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Gansu and Sichuan China, Tibet, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and back through the Caspian Sea to Armenia/Azerbaijan.

5- INDOCOM

Lands bordering the Indian Ocean, the Arabian, Laccadive and Andaman Seas, and the Bay of Bengal.

6- SOPACOM

Lands bordering the Pacific Ocean and contiguous waters south of 20 degrees north latitude.

7- NOPACOM

Lands bordering the Pacific Ocean and contiguous waters north of 20 degrees north latitude.

8- NOLANTICOM

Lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean and contiguous waters north of 14 degrees north latitude.

9- SOLANTICOM

Lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean and contiguous waters south of 14 degrees north latitude.

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Epilogue

Note that the COCOMs are named for bodies of water while their Areas of Responsibility (AORs) are referenced as dry or hot (desert/glacier) areas of real estate. This taxonomy comes about by virtue of the central role of bodies of water in producing speed of communications across and between geographic systems. Land is not held — and in consequence peace maintained — unless its waters adjacent are amiable. In reverse, be it noted that waters held amiable by another nation require no deployment of US COCOM assets to enforce their amiability.

Note also that in this conception of USA COCOMs, Afghanistan is the logical base for CASCOM, being as it is a sort of sea of hot (desert/glacier) land porting major and ancient lines of communication still in service.

Note also that CASCOM solves the China problem by bisecting that benighted whatsit north to south.

Other facets of this schema require examination. For example:

• A COCOM should comprise three sections acting in unison, Diplomacy, Finance, War-Fighting, with the commander of the latter in over-all command of the COCOM.

• COCOMs should be the chief and forward presence of US statecraft. State, Treasury, and Pentagon HQs in Washington D.C. should be re-purposed and re-designed as second echelon COCOM support cadre.

• CIA should be terminated as an independent agency. Their domestic facilities should be folded into the second echelon COCOM support cadres billeted in place of former State, Treasury, and Pentagon HQs. CIA foreign facilities should be folded into the COCOM whose AOR includes them.

• Opportunities for COCOM activities inside the dynamics of Three Brothers Allegiance Alliance (USA, India, Russia) require clarification and enumeration.

• Only a nation state, and really only USA, can conceive and construct a COCOM schema. So, to visionaries fired by dreams that I have saved them the labor of conceiving a post-Westphalia global order, I say: go ahead, give it a shot, but don’t whinge when your teeth smash against reality and you cry out for mother.

Finally, to doubters I say:

Don’t look a gifted horse in the mouth.

Labor Improbus Omnia Vincit

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• Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, September 7, 1997 /  Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription

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