I am all for memorializing America's wars and honoring those who served. But everything does not need to be on the Mall, which has become overcrowded. The remaining open areas should be protected; they are the frame and setting for the museums and monuments, and there is already too much clutter.
The WWII Memorial defaced one of the greatest and most iconic vistas in America. For MLK, we chopped out a section of the cherry trees along the tidal basin. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Women in Vietnam Memorial and the Korean War Memorial are all fine in and of themselves, but in the setting of the Mall, they are out of scale (too small) and too crowded, jumbled into a cluster of intrusions at the western end of the Reflecting Pool. (They are just out of site to the left of the picture you posted.) They should all be somewhere else. The Museum of the American Indian is a disruptive architectural presence that killed important sightlines; it would be an ok building somewhere else, but not where it is. (It's also a dud of a museum because the tribes got to control content.) The African American Museum intrudes on space that should have been left clear, as it is part of the visual frame for the Washington Monument; again, it would be a fine building somewhere else, but not where it's sited. And so it goes.
It has become customary for every group with a worthy cause to strike an attitude and say, "We are being disrespected if we don't get our space on the Mall." And time and again, Congress caves to this kind of pressure. They are ruining the Mall. Maybe it's time to just pave the whole thing over, rename it "The Plaza of Identity Politics," and require all memorials to be mounted on skids so they can be rotated in and out every six months or so, just so every group that can afford a lobbyist can have its day "on the Mall." You think it's going to stop with Desert Storm? The next time the Democrats are in power, we'll be adding a rainbow flag memorial, a Hispanic Heritage Museum, something for Asian Americans and an Obama Memorial opposite the Jefferson, but bigger because Jefferson was a slaveholder and Obama reinvented the universe.
There have been various proposals over the years to create new museum and memorial clusters in DC away from the Mall. Gentrification and some very nice large-scale neighborhood redevelopments (e.g. the Southeast and Southwest waterfronts) have already claimed some of the choice sites, but there are still a number of good ones left. The trick is, some group has to agree to be the first to pioneer a new space. If it were up to me, I'd start by opening a couple of new Smithsonian Museums on a new site with growth potential, and plan from the beginning for long term expansion.
There was a wonderful plan that proposed this perhaps 15 or 20 years ago. That one was centered on turning the South Capitol Street, North Capitol Street and East Capitol Street corridors into new monumental entryways into central DC. If you think in terms of rebuilding those axes, and think in terms of a hundred year plan, you can begin to see the potential. East Capitol Street runs through a now renovated and very attractive historic district that should be left untouched on the DC side of the river, but the stadium-armory complex is now in play (as RFK Stadium is empty and derelict, and the DC General site is now a homeless shelter that is slated to close). A lot could be done on that site and tied into the redevelopment of the Anacostia River corridor, which is rapidly changing and is likely to become one of the premier urban riverfronts in America. The high ground is on the Anacostia side of the river, and the whole arc from Bladensburg on down to Buzzard Point, where the Anacostia flows into the Potomac, will be golden. It'll take some time for this to happen, but things are already moving fast. Far better to start siting some museums and memorials here than to keep shoehorning compromised designs into inadequate spaces on an overcrowded Mall.
Talking to me about it isn’t going to change my mind. You need to find out who the planners are in D.C. and pester them.
It took years for this last monument to be approved; you needed to be actively working against it in that time frame, or find out what’s next and actively work against them.
This is America. Have at it. :)