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To: AndyJackson

Not only do you have the dnc talking points down to a Tee, like the dems, you also offer no solutions.


78 posted on 05/17/2008 9:44:32 AM PDT by death2tyrants
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To: death2tyrants
Not only do you have the dnc talking points down to a Tee, like the dems, you also offer no solutions.

First, I would bet at the end of a day that I am a whole lot more conservative than you are. Second, as a retired senior Naval Officer who spent a lot of time on military planning staffs and at war colleges I think I know a lot more about the military planning and strategy process than you do. In the third place how can we start talking about solutions when I am arguing with a head-in-the-sand bushbot who denies there is even a problem.

The problem for us conservatives is that a tidal wave of voter resentment is about to kill us at the poles. The path to recovery is an analysis of what has gone wrong. That begins, not with blaming the media, but with looking in a mirror, looking into our own souls and looking at our own ugly mugs and figuring out how to change ourselves.

Unfortunately one of the solutions to strategic blunders is not to make them. Having made them, there is often no good way out. That is why they are called strategic blunders. Hitler invading Russia was one of the biggest strategic blunders in the history of warfare. It was doubly a blunder because Napolean had already proved that it was one of the biggest strategic blunders in the history of warfare.

The DNC did not write the talking points. Republicans are the author of these talking points, and all the Dems did is find them lying in the street when they were out playing in traffic.

Military strategy is an all inclusive integrative systems analysis of the environment, and what you hope to be able to achieve in it. It's fundamental roots are not in "Know thine enemy" but in the famous quote at the temple at Delphi "Know thyself." It starts not with a telescope but a mirror. You don't get to decide to do some of it and not other parts of it. You have to understand it all. When you decide on course of action A, you are precluded from actions B,C and D because your resources included finance, and especially command attention are very strictly circumscribed.

Petraeus is, thankfully, part of the solution in Iraq, because it begins to address the requirement of having a truly deep strategic thinker in command. Even so, we don't know what success would look like there in Iraq, Iraq as it actually exists, taking into account the character of the people and its civil, religious and economic institution. Part of the solution is to drop the idological us vs them, conservatives vs liberal appeasers, etc. etc. Name calling is not a solution to our strategic problems in the middle east.

A real energy policy that is other than "cheap oil" at its roots is the ultimate solution to our strategic problems. The strategic environment with resurgent Indian and Chinese economies, even ignoring if there is any genuine military dimension, requires that we start to figure out how to fall back on our own resources. Part of this is lots of nuclear energy, of course using solar and wind and efficiency whenever they make sense. Easing the problems of domestic oil production is part of a short term solution, but is not a solution for our grandchildren.

Bush started down the nuclear path, in fact, but he spent so much of his political capital on running the Iraq war that he had to sacrifice his nuclear energy goals. That is part of strategic planning, as well, deciding what fundamentally you really want to achieve with the finite temporal, economic and political resources at hand.

83 posted on 05/17/2008 10:31:33 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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