Military has war all wrong, author says (Col Hackworth speaks out )

More than a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the nation's military leaders have failed to understand the enemy and the kind of war needed to unearth the terrorists, retired Army colonel and author David H. Hackworth said Saturday. "The leadership is thinking conventionally," Hackworth said in an interview. "It's time to take off the conventional hat and put on the unconventional hat. You have to understand your enemy and the nature of war."

Note that this "we have to think unconventionally" scolding comes from the same idiot who a few weeks ago wrote:

Even though many experts say it isn't so, let's buy into Cheney's pitch and agree that Iraq has a few small nuclear warheads. The question then becomes: "Can he land them in New York City or Los Angeles?" The answer is: "No." Saddam just doesn't have the fleets of ICBMs that we and 43's new best friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, do. All he can muster at most are a few-dozen wheezing Scud missiles, onto which he could try to screw his alleged nuke warheads. On a good day, these throwbacks to the Vietnam era would have a range of 100 miles and be about as accurate as a blind man firing a shotgun at the sound of a bat in a forest.

The utter, blinding stupidity of this just stuns me. Has Hackworth never heard of SHIPS, for god's sake? Arriving ships, and their cargos, are not inspected until they have already *arrived* in port. By then, it's too late. *boom* If this is a sample of Hackworth's "strategic thinking", he's clearly unfit for the task.

And he's clearly unfit to be lecturing anyone else on how they're allegedly thinking "too conventionally".

Hackworth's bitterness is showing through again.

He should open his eyes and look at how this conflict has been waged so far. When we went info Afganistan he and a whole lot of other experts predicted disaster, or in his case, disaster if we didn't follow his advice.

All the reminders of the failed British and Soviet invasions, the coming winter...etc. And how did we go in? A combination of low tech on the ground (Rangers on horseback with local tribesmen) and high tech air support.

Look at our latest action, with a CIA Preditor.

The administration is rewritting the book on warfare and Hackworth is still reading the last chapters of the previous book. He was a brave man, but don't confuse bravery with intelligence.

Wage and price controls are an entirely different thing for they remove the signals to the market that create the incentives to allocate resources appropriately. Geo Politics and the propping up of foreign leaders is different and we can find times when leaving things alone would have made things better or where a failure to act made the eventual war worse. I am not familiar enough with the reasons that we originally set up the Shah to comment. As for aiding Saddam we did stem any expansion of the radical Iranian revolution which at the time was the more serious threat.

The real world is not black and white at all. That is my point. The real world in the Middle East is total mess, populated by medieval Jim Jeffords who can't be trusted. One day you are wasting tax money bolstering one bloodthirsty dictator (who kills his own people with poison gas), and in another you are helping his opponent and then the players reverse again in an endless exercise of futility. The most prudent policy in such a "real world" is to stay the hell out, let events unfold on their own, and concentrate our resources on the national defense of the U.S.

BTW, I am not proposing isolationism but rather a policy of defensivism. The Afghan operation was completely justified as a self-defense action.

BTW, I am not proposing isolationism but rather a policy of defensivism. The Afghan operation was completely justified as a self-defense action. I agree with that! And the same will apply to forcing Iraqi insaniac to disarm, as a deterrence to future farming out of WMD. I don't know how much you know about our coastal vulnerability, but suffice it to be said, a nuke developed in a 'left alone' despotic dictatorial regime would be a catastrophic development for US. Many dominoes will have to fall in the future, near future, for the U.S. to have even a simblance of safety. The woods are growing darker ... we're far from out of the woods against terrorist strikes here at home. I do agree that we should do a whole lot more to try and secure our geographic borders, and application of much of our top secret technology would be well advised in that endeavor. [It is in fact technically feasible to place sensors on our borders, backed up by flyovers of unmanned craft, and in effect shut down the sieve now leaking illegals into America by foot. The INS could do a thousand percent better in stopping a legal influx, also. Time to get rolling on these vital programs, don'tcha think?]

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