Very good article.
One of the key sentences: The greatest lessons the Desert Storm Army can impart on today’s Army is that without senior leaders who really care and have moral courage, the Army is severely weakened, if not doomed.
The big negative I’ve had about Desert Storm is Colin Powell, who convinced Bush 41 to pull out before destroying Saddam and his regime. That stupid decision and 9/11 required Bush 43 to send our forces back to Iraq.
Thanks for that little bit of reality the writer seemed to have overlooked. Gen. Franks was sorely mistaken in his bold statement because the leadership above him failed, IMO.
Colin Powell played only a minor role.
GHW Bush was a foreign policy realist who took the advice of men like Brent Scowcroft. They well understood the major problems involved in conquering and occupying an Islamic country. Once Saddam Hussein was driven out of Kuwait with his army in ruins he was no threat to his neighbors. He wasn’t even a regional power. He had spent 10 years fighting Iran with nothing to show for it.
GW Bush on the other hand was filled to the brim with the utopian nonsense of the democracy project neocons that he took on as advisers. They believed that it is possible to reconstruct Arab states at will and Iraq was to be their test case. And they didn’t believe that Islam had a vote in what they were planning. Too bad that they didn’t pay the price themselves instead of the GIs sent to put their experiment into practice.