Posted on 08/13/2007 11:46:18 AM PDT by bnelson44
Summary: Did the Bush administration disregard military expertise before the Iraq war? Should military leaders have done more to protest in response?
Michael Desch's "Bush and the Generals" (May/June 2007) contains significant errors of fact and interpretation. One of us, Richard Myers, has direct knowledge and personal experience with the subject; the other, Richard Kohn, has been studying and observing American civil-military relations for 45 years.
Bush administration officials did not, as Desch charges, "overrule" the military "on the number of troops to be sent" to Iraq or "the timing of ... deployment." Both were the result of over a year of questioning and discussion back and forth, and the final plan contained contingencies for different numbers of forces depending on the course of the campaign. To be sure, the combatant commander often found the probing and questioning of plans by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff distasteful. But in the end, all involved supported the final plan regardless of the disagreements along the way.
Contrary to Desch's interpretation, the Kosovo intervention in 1999 was not evidence of poor civil-military relations. The Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, and President Bill Clinton all agreed on limiting the application of force in Kosovo -- overruling the advice of General Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander for Europe, as was legitimate in the civil-military relationship.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignaffairs.org ...
Clearly, Rumsfeld’s experiments in designing boutique brigades,and the so-called expensive transformation and letting Naval, Marine and even Air Farce Generals run an Army war has been very destructive to the Army.
These two party’s will be the end of America because we hold them in higher regard than we do our freedoms and sovereignty
Already most here have forgot what just happened a few weeks ago with immigration .
I couldn’t care less about any of them or their cohorts .I have accepted the fact that I no longer have a vote or say so .
As long as we control the WH, we can blame Clintoon for anything and everything.
He was such a powerful and historical figure that it is extremely difficult (obviously) for us to change or reverse and of his policy decisions.
AFAIAC the United Sates may yet not survive the Clinton presidency.
That's appears to becoming self-evident.. ;)
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