Because we have pansies at the top. A RoE are BS.
I disagree that pansies are “good guys” and I think real men are the good guys.
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf had all the qualities of a good leader. We all thought that Petraeus did too, but he lacked the moral courage to do the right thing.
Okay, I’ll give him another three weeks to come forth and make me a liar.
There are problems in the military leadership, that’s for sure. But this particular problem isn’t military—it’s political.
HST famously quarreled with General MacArthur and fired him because he actually wanted to win the Korean War.
JFK was famous for starting wars with no intention of winning them, although Eisenhower warned him against it, beginning with the Bay of Pigs and going on to Vietnam.
LBJ made things worse.
And with a few exceptions, it’s been that way ever since.
Yes, we have far too many Perfumed Princes for generals, willing to set Rules of Engagement that favor the enemy and decimate our troops, but they wouldn’t be there in the first place if that wasn’t what the politicians wanted.
Terrible conclusion, the Army wins the war, and then the team owners forfeit the win.
These are political surrenders, not losses on the battlefield.
Mattis is one of the exceptions.
The only ROE should be to win!
Eisenhower and MacArthur stayed for the whole war. Now the turnover is huge. Petraeus even had spare time to bring his biographer. The evils of mission creep.
This article is utter hooey. The US military always comes through, and if the outcome isn’t what is wanted, it is because political forces, not military ones, have fouled things up.
The US military suffered NO, zero “humiliating defeat” in Vietnam. It didn’t lose a single major battle. And the US trained South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), with zero resupply from a hateful Democrat congress, still held out for TWO YEARS against an enemy with UNLIMITED resupply from the Soviet Union, AFTER the US military had left.
And in Gulf War I, the US military crushed the Iraqi army, the 4th largest army in the world, including the largest tank battle in history, demonstrating that the equipment and tactics of the Soviet Union would have lost in a conflict with the US.
That we did not continue the war to the point of conquering Iraq, was solely because politically, the US did not want to, and it was a selling point to all our allies that we didn’t want to. Perhaps a mistake, but a political one, not a military one.
So what’s this hooey about “good guys and bad generals”?
Wrong. What happened not once, but twice in Iraq will be taught for a hundred years as a classic case of a drastically outnumbered but better-trained and -coordinated and technologically superior force annihilating the enemy on his own ground. I'll go further and state that what happened after that was a story of anti-insurgent warfare that was seldom equaled before that and never since.
The entire point of "asymmetric" warfare is to avoid that sort of confrontation and if anyone wants to know why Saddam Hussein will be happy to explain, but you'd better have a Ouija board.
Once again, we see the false argument that ‘the American Army lost the war in Vietnam.’ The Army won every major (battalion-sized or larger) and most of the smaller firefights (that I was in, anyway). The war was lost at the negotiating table, and by Congress’s refusal to re-engage, or even adequately support our ally, when the PRV broke the agreement.
The US didn’t lose VietNam. We quit. That’s worse. But one can’t blame the generals for that.
“By all accounts, the present-day United States military is the best—that is, the most capable—in all the world.”
LOL! No need to read further.
Since WWII - no matter how poorly equipped, how small, how pathetically funded, how uneducated, how ragtag, how undisciplined, how disorganized - have we once vanquished an enemy into unconditional surrender. Of course we’ve never delared any actual wars either, except the never-ending “wars” against Communism, poverty, drugs, terror, etc etc etce tce etce egdhbcrn/klCL:
Except for Grenada, Panama, Iraq #1, Iraq #2, Afganistan.
The problem is not with the GIs, but with the officer corp, the Pentagon, and the commander in chief.
Nope...they are “go along to get along” and make flag/general officer rank.
I had the great good fortune to watch Andrew Bacevich mentor his young Officers. He made me wish that I was one of them. Andrew Bacevich is one of the few people in the world that, when he talks, I shut up and listen. Conservatives would do well to have a tour of Conservative speakers including Andrew Bacevich, Victor Davis Hanson and Daniel Greenfield. We would be smart to have these guys serve as mentors to young Conservatives.
I knew we were in real trouble when the memorandum came down saying that it wasn’t fair to evaluate Soldiers based on their performance in combat. You could end a career if the Soldier was one second late on the fitness test or because the Soldier looked fat, but it wasn’t fair to evaluate Soldiers based on their performance in combat? We have an Army of runners with all that entails.