Posted on 01/02/2007 10:27:10 AM PST by oldtimer2
Colonel Snodgrass should be either the SOD or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
I can feel my blood pressure go up every time I see Robert McNamara's name in print. The man was one of the greatest examples in my lifetime of a liberal educated idiot. He was consistently wrong, particularly with regard to weapons systems (example: trying to push the F111 onto the navy), yet the liberals have always loved him.
While the deaths of American troops increased with nothing to show for their sacrifice.
That was a good read. I'd like a bit more of his recommendations on how to procede from here...
On the mark. I am always somewhat taken aback by the sense in this forum that Harry Truman was a great president. He did some things right, but he did several things very, very wrong.
He let China go without any effort to block Mao's takeover. Indeed, many of the advisers he inherited from FDR were Communists, and supported Mao.
He fired Douglas MacArthur, who had successfully turned the Korean War around, and forced a stalemate. That set the pattern for Vietnam, later.
I would agree that McNamara and his Whizz Kids were total idiots. Symptomatically, McNamara was responsible for the Edsel before he came on board the administration. McGeorge Bundy was another idiot. I remember riding up with him in an elevator in NYC after he left in disgrace, and the man was clearly an idiot. You could see it just by looking at him. Earlier, before he went into the JFK administration, he had been Dean of Freshmen while I was a student at Harvard, and he was an idiot then, too.
The conclusion is evident. Change the paradigm, or lose the war. Whether we have the political and intellectual will to do so, I don't know. I suspect, although I don't know, that General Gates in Iraq is still thinking this way, although he may just be Bush's current fall guy. But it's obvious that the Rules of Engagement are losers, all the way.
And it's obvious that we never should have drawn the line at the borders of Iraq. To win in Iraq, we needed to go into Syria and deal with Iran--several years ago, not now.
Now it will be much harder.
Ike knew more about war than any president since, and probably more than any except for Washington.
just my .02
pingferlater.
ping
Here's another good article along these lines: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1761376/posts
The mistake was turning the governments of both nations over the the local people far too soon.
We did not do that after WWII. It was well over 5 years after WWII before we turned control of Germany and Japan back to the locals. During that time in excess of 5 years, that the resistive forces in both nations were severely controlled and punished.
We punished members of the war leadership in both Germany and Japan. We did not allow the Japanese or Germans to punish their own as we have in Iraq. We did it with war crimes trials. We put lots of people to death in both Japan and Germany.
It took years to train the locals in both Japan and Germany to govern themselves.
From the end of World War II it was General Douglas MacArthur who ran Japan with an iron fist. He wrote their constitution and he decided who would and who would not have power in the Japanese nation.
We have re-learned the lessons of winning wars. We have not re-learned the lessons of how to convert an aggressive violent nation into a peaceful democratic nation. That, history teaches, takes years of using force, power, and education to accomplish.
WE have forgotten the lessons of World War II. But it is not the lesson of how to win war. It is the lesson of how to build an allied nation.
There is only one absolute rule of war: WIN
All others are negotiable.
Yes, Ike, Washington and U.S. Grant knew more about war than any others, although generals like Jackson, Harrison, Hayes, etc. did know more than a little about war, only Washington, Ike and Grant stood in those supreme theater command positions in which they had to consider EVERYTHING, and not just battlefield strategy and tactics.
The U.S. military has rarely been very successful at waging war overseas under the "limited warfare" paradigm -- and that includes major campaigns like World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as minor ones like Somalia. The basic inherent problem with any military campaign of this kind is that there is a tremendous "home field advantage" that comes with them -- which means the odds are greatly stacked in the enemy's favor.
This is why the U.S. has really only been successful in modern warfare in cases like World War II where the basic strategy involved pummeling an enemy nation into oblivion before occupying it.
bttt
bump
Indeed. A people will fight much more fiercely to protect its homeland and its nearby 'possessions' than a people will fight to take others' territory far from home.
You know, there really is a lesson in what Col. Snodgrass writes here about how America MUST conduct its modern wars.
Given democracy, the most crucial thing is that the war be QUICK.
It doesn't matter how many civilian casualties there are. Although it's cold to say it, it doesn't really matter (in terms of winning the war) how many American casualalites there are either. Nor does it matter how much it costs.
The only thing that matters is that it MUST be completed within one year.
Think it through. President Bush showed that by simply being extremely stubborn, he could essentially do what he wanted to. Cognress designates money for operations about a year at a time, more or less. Of course, once operations START, Congress can refuse FURTHER money if there is national horror at casualties, but until the war goes South, once Congress has approved it and people are gung-ho, the money will continue to flow to get READY for the war.
What that means is that the Rumsfeld Doctrine is out. You do not want a light footprint. You want a MASSIVE footprint. Even if that will mean more Americans in harm's way in the short run. Why? Because Congress will vote to give you a blank check in the buildup, so you can put absolutely enormous forces there, and months of resupply, before you pull the trigger. With no casualties on tv and all of the fanfare of deployment, preparation, excitement and anticipation, the public and Congress - everybody - will be with the war.
So, you can't do it as Rumsfeld did and use "Just enough". That might work militarily, short term, but it'll lose a long war long term. Long wars are losers in our democracy.
Instead, you need HUGE force deployments. Massive, gargaantuan things. Congress and the people will always suppotrt that. They'll pay for it without complaint. After all, the war hasn't started, there's no casualties yet, and the C-in-C can always argue Uutterly persuasively that all of this force and more is needed to keep casualties to a minimum.
Then, when it's time to go, you hit the button and it's REAL "Shock and Awe". To hell with all of this precision attack business, which is designed to minimize enemy civilian casualties. Do THAT, and you have to go way to slow. Also, the enemy gets to hide among civilians. No. You have to go in massively, and put massive firepower rather indiscriminately on top of ANY point of resistance. You don't try to separate the wheat from the chaff. You stand off and destroy whole villages from the air if any shots are fired from them. Naturally, this means a couple of million enemy civilians dead. But those deaths happen all at once, at the onset of the campaign, while the media are still rolling around in the Hummvees with the troops, and not out there scouting out trouble among the enemy civilians.
Eventually the news will get out of the horriffic enemy civilian casualties, and that will provoke and outcry. But the money has already been spent, and America will look like it's winning. And the war will be nearing completion. The handwringing takes time to build up, which is why going FAST is the key. Going FAST means using firepower, especially air power, for areas effects, killing everything and everybody in all poonts that resist. It rips the hell out of enemy civilians. Does that make MORE enemies? No. It makes terrorized, traumatized, hollow-eyed people trembling in the ruins, like Japanese and Germans after World War II. Of course it is utterly brutal and even evil, but it wins the war in a year.
Thus far, there have been perhaps 100,000 Iraqi dead (all sorts) in this war. There should have been 20 times that number in the first 3 months, and the war would be over by now, and Americans would mostly enjoy the victory. Becqause if the war never went south, nobody would care about the snivelers.
That's the way we have to fight now.
If we had de-populated the tribal areas of Pakistan, we would not need fighting troops in Afghanistan. That would also give a warning to Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.