Lt. Col. Ralph Peters Gets it Right!

Did anyone see the News Hour roundtable discussion with Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (Rt., a professor from academia and a former Air Force Joint Chief? The Prof was whining about the Taliban gaining sympathy from Afgani civilian deaths, when Peter's chimed in, (and I'm paraphrasing)

"On September 11 over 5000 innocent American civilians were brutally murdered. So I don't care to listen to the Taliban until they have a number that approaches that level, or even 50,000 for that matter."

and a former Air Force Joint Chief?

Light Colonels are not Joint Chiefs. In fact there is no Air Force "joint chief" There is a Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and of the Army. The Navy has the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Marines have the Commandant. All of them together, plus a Chairman and Vice Chairman, make up THE Joint Chiefs of Staff, the primary military advisors to the President.

Lt. Col Peters, a former Air Force Intelligence officer, was at one time on the staff of the Air Force's Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence.

I believe Ralph Peters was Army of the U.S. not USAF. He wrote two splendid books. One; Red Army where a Soviet invasion of Germany succeeds after a four or five day conflict where, unlike Tom Clancy, almost everything fails to go as planned. Two: The War 2020 about a conflict between the U.S. and a militarized and technologically superior Japan. I believe he has also finished a non fiction treatise on 21st Century war.He's one smart guy who should be sitting with the likes of Rumsfeld and Powell and not Jim Lehrer!

You are correct, I misread the bio in the article at the link, from the Army War College's Parameters said he was on the ACS-Intell staff, when a Major. Anyway here's a more recent and more to the point article article and another

I used to serve under, way under, the AF ACS-I, and I guess the brain didn't register that the Army had one too.

I just finished reading Ralph Peter's novel, Twilight of Heroes(published 1997), yesterday. It was not only well written, it was gripping......better IMHO than Clancey's books.

I was really impressed with the catalogue of his past accomplishments. Here's what the book's back cover says about him:

Ralph Peters is an Army officer with over two decades of service. He has traveled to more than forty countries, from the Andean Ridge to the Hindu Kush, and from Mexican drug havens to the civil wars of the former Soviet Union. He has published six novels on diverse themes, as well as doxens of acclaimed but controversial articles on strategy, military theory and ethics. Regarded as a cutting-edge thinker on culture and conflict, he has cleaned latrines as a private, negotiated with the KGB in the Kremlin, slept in the mud with the Infantry, advised U.S. and foreign ambassadors, gone alone into Fundamentalist-run refugee camps, lectured internationally, cheerfully carried diplomatic pouches for a very confused Iranian embassy, and served in the Executive Office of the President. Mistaken for a soccer player from Haiti, he has been marched off a train at machine-gun point in the former Yugoslavia; he has raided drug traffickers, been guest of the Khyber Rifles, labored in the shadows of Ararat, parleyed with aging Germans in Bolivia, poked around the Amazon, fallen off the odd mountain, and applied himelf to the mosques of Samarkand. He spends his best days with his wife, a journalist, at their home on Capitol Hill.

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