Posted on 08/05/2002 3:55:48 AM PDT by kattracks
Newsweek reports this week that although the war with Iraq has not begun, "So far the big battles are in Washington, not Baghdad."
The magazine notes that "Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only combat veteran among Bush’s senior aides, is said to be determined that if U.S. troops are committed, they go in with overwhelming force. Vice President Dick Cheney (who had student and parent deferments during Vietnam) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (a Navy pilot in the years between Korea and Vietnam) are eager to finish the job Bush’s father started when he was president."
Both Cheney and Rumsfeld believe far fewer troops are needed for an Iraqi invasion.
Newsweek also claims that "By Rumsfeld’s orders, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been shut out of the planning process - a decision that has only added to the generals’ unhappiness."
Despite the Washington battles, the U.S. is in high gear for war.
The magazine states:
- U.S. munitions plants have put on extra shifts to rebuild arsenals depleted during the Afghan war.
- A few hundred uniformed personnel are working as advance teams in Jordan and elsewhere, assessing the need for new air strips, wider roads and the like.
- And even before Saddam became a priority target, the U.S. Department of Energy was working to get America’s strategic petroleum reserve up to its full capacity of 700 million barrels - enough to meet U.S. energy needs for more than 80 days in a crunch.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration Saddam Hussein/Iraq War on Terrorism
2. We don't have the same military in 2002 that we did in 1991. We are down to 10 Army divisions and 3 Marine divisions, and committing 250K soldiers to an operation in Iraq would make us extremely vulnerable elsewhere.
3. The reference to Powell's military experience is a logical fallacy of the appeal-to-authority type. Anyone with a passing knoweldge of military history could name dozens--nay hundreds--of people with combat experience who had no strategic sense or insight whatsoever. Moreover, one common deficiency among professional soldiers is that their experience so dominates their thinking that it blinds them to changes that make this experience less relevant, and can prove to be a liability in the face of important technological and doctrinal changes--the "fighting the last war" problem.
4. Saddam's only real threat to us is his bio and chem warfare capability. This threat is greater when we mass our forces and take a long time to build them up (a la 1991). Reliance upon speed, maneuver, stealth, and deception in lieu of massive force will minimize our vulnerability to this type of threat. Powell's preferred approach would maximize it.
Rumsfeld et al advocate substituting imagination, information dominance, and technology for numbers. This exploits our comparative advantage. Overwhelming force need not require overwhelming numbers.
Powell seems mired in the past, unable to escape the bounds of his own experience. He is an exemplar of a longstanding tradition in the US Army that advocates reliance on mass to achieve victory and distrusts operational innovation or risk-taking--see Russell F. Weigley's Eisenhower's Lieutenants for a devastating critique of this mindset. He is a Bradley, not a Patton. This is not a compliment. (See Victor Davis Hanson's review of Carlo D'Este's new Eisenhower biography in the most recent National Review or his recent book that has some pretty revealing things to say about Bradley--and which come eerily close to describing Powell.)
Presidents should not be allowed to play with the state of military readiness, and congress should not be allowed to either. There should be a standard that no politican is allowed to mess with.
I suppose this is possible if we split hairs.
Sounds silly to apply it to the commander-in-chief.
Change the constitution?
I agree with Rumsfeld. Look outside the box, be unpredictable and utilize any new technology we have. The masses of soldiers can come later when needed.
So, according to you, we should just drop civilian control of the military, and allow them to run their own show? No freakin' way. There's a very good reason that we have civilian control of the military. If allowed to run unchecked, the military can become a government unto itself, unresponsive to civil authority. No good can come of such an arrangement.
Regards,
Snidely
When this is all said and done, I would like someone to explain to me why Saddam waited while we moved men and machinery into the area. Why didn't he attack when he had the numerical superiority?
Because he and most of rest of the world thought it was
all a bluff, and that the U.S. didn't have the balls to really take large scale military action.
Remember our will as a nation was supposed to have been destroyed by Vietnam.
This idea is in some of the basic theories that Sun Tzu espoused; it appears we have not yet learnt them well.
Another strawman often brought up is that we can achieve victory through the vague notion of 'informational dominance'. What does that mean? As a Marine, I know that informational dominance does little if you do not have the means at your disposal to destroy the enemies' will to fight. History has shown that when it comes down to a battle between hostile wills, massing of firepower and arms upon the enemy is usually required. This can be achieved in different ways - but mere 'information dominance' does not guarantee anything.
Having said that, I still support having elected civilians in control over the military.
Someone once said war was too important to leave to the Generals. The military may become too focus on one aspect of a conflict (military action) and either not be aware of, or care about any other aspect.
There are some ineffiencies with a republic form of government, but that sometimes works in our favor (and of course sometimes works against us.)
The way President Johnson conducted the war in Viet Nam bordered on being criminal, and in a just world, he would have been impeached.
You have not presented any alternative that would prevent this from occuring without at the same time preventing a military take over of the country.
Present to me a consitutional ammendment that would keep civilian control, but allow the military to conduct a war any way they see fit.
I don't think you can. So we are stuck with our present system where the President is commander in chief. And, if we have someone incompetant such as Johnson, or Clinton bad things happen. As tragic as that is, it is a risk I would am willing to live with, compared to the alternative.
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