Posted on 12/31/2014 7:28:09 PM PST by US Navy Vet
The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win. In mid-September, while President Obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in Iraq and Syria, he traveled to Central Command headquarters, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. There he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the U.S. military strategy turned out to be.
The part of the speech intended to get coverage was Obama’s rationale for reengaging the United States in Iraq, more than a decade after it first invaded and following the long and painful effort to extricate itself. This was big enough news that many cable channels covered the speech live. I watched it on an overhead TV while I sat waiting for a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. When Obama got to the section of his speech announcing whether he planned to commit U.S. troops in Iraq (at the time, he didn’t), I noticed that many people in the terminal shifted their attention briefly to the TV. As soon as that was over, they went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their Cinnabons as the president droned on.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military.
The military is the only institution among those mentioned that has not been overtaken and fundamentally transformed by the Left. The philosophy of the Left and its ability to attract the weak and the hedonists has destroyed American Institutions and continues to do so today. They are working hard to bring their deadly disease to the one institution that up until the Obama Administration has successfully resisted infection.
What’s in a name? The Affordable Care Act, really? It’s a political cover. Think of the number of jihadists who are now six feet under. We’ve creamed a ton of radicals and they aren’t coming back to fight another day. Our kill ratios are on the order of 100 to 1. That’s unprecedented.
We’ve set the jihadists and Muslim radicals back a half century. SA is “liberalizing”. This is a long war and will be won over a period of generations. Freedom and knowledge will see to it.
Correct.
Some people just won't buy the truth.
This is a different country today. A big part of the problem is that nobody -- including the government or the citizenry -- can possibly have a "commitment to win" when nobody knows what the heck we're trying to achieve.
Hussein needed to go and his sons needed to go. However, we went in without really looking at the strategic ends and how to achieve them. I’ve personally chatted with one of the war planners, and OIF was a clusterf**k from the outset.
Example:
One of the national strategic goals was to have the Iraqis take over their own country quickly and run all command and control thus allowing us to exit quickly. However, I’m sure you remember the famous “shock and awe” campaign. What was its purpose? The destruction of the entire Iraqi command and control network. Also, the decision was made (I don’t know by who, I assume Bush) to disband the Iraqi military. So who was going to run the show? What were those former Iraqi Soldiers going to do now? The foreign invaders smashed their military and fired anyone they didn’t kill, now what were they going to do for money? Hence a major piece of the wonderful insurgency we dealt with for almost a decade. These decisions matter, and they were some bad decisions.
That’s not even getting into the internal military problems with regards to building progress year-to-year versus each higher-level officer trying to reinvent the wheel so as to get a better OER. In Iraq and Afghanistan we fought a dozen or so one-year wars, not a 12-year war.
I don’t necessarily think that we shouldn’t have gone in to Afghanistan or Iraq, but we sure as hell should’ve had a better clue what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Bremer famously remarked to a colleague on his way out the door to Iraq that he’d see his colleague by Christmas. His colleague had a better grasp of what was about to happen and told Bremer we’d be lucky if we got out of there in 10 years.
First, he talks about the draft and how Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft. He speaks of Rangel in terms of a guy who was looking to enable success and bridge the civilian-military divide. What he doesn't mention is that Rangel voted against his own bill to help defeat it. It was simply a political ploy to try to paint Republicans as desperate for more service members and even willing to draft people to do it! Pure posturing that was pathetic then and is pathetic now.
The author also meanders a lot in his criticism of this civilian-military divide, particularly with his bitching about the F35. While it's well-established that the program is basically a disaster, what does that have to do with anything? Congress sets the parameters the military has to work within to acquire equipment. I've seen the broad strokes of the acquisition process. It's unbelievably complex. The Air Force, in particular, has officers who spend their entire careers doing nothing but that job. The Army tosses it out like an extra duty, basically, and the results show. If Congress was serious about shoring up the acquisition process while streamlining it for useful purposes rather than counting pennies while wasting $1000s, they could. But they won't.
Lastly, a big part of the author's complaint seems to hover around an inability to criticize the military and how it does things. I haven't seen any such limitations. The press loves to criticize how we do things. If there's an issue with a lack of knowledge base in the press, how is that the military's problem? Ultimately, this smells like a 1960s/1970s jackass that longs for the days of screaming at and spitting on returning Soldiers.
Bingo. Cheap drugs to addle the brains of the young men. Promote homosexuality and load up the forces with women.
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