Posted on 05/12/2010 9:38:20 PM PDT by neverdem
By and large, intellectually the services have been pathetic for decades about less than total warfare. Since WWII ( at least ) wars have been in low rent, politically messy, population rich third world countries. The military bureaucracy just doesn’t want to think about it. They’d much rather have Army Times discussions for a year about a new uniform change, or Regiment structure.
Can you blame them? Who could have war gamed Iraq into Vietnam V.2, including the rats de facto aiding and abetting Al Qaeda for domestic political gain? Nobody could have planned an adequate Phase IV of the invasion of Iraq in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong, IMHO.
Any of the old SF guys would of. The Brits, for hundreds of years were good, very good. Post WWII, not so much.
There was no, zero, zip post reaching into Baghdad planning. The Army thought that State would handle it. The WH and State, thought the Pentagon. No one was fired.( Bush’s never fire anyone )
I've heard several discussions that hit the nail on the head. After Vietnam, the general conscientious was that we should toss all of our COIN/FID doctrine out the door because there was no way we wanted to get involved in something like that again. Which is also precisely why our enemies have choose to fight us as they do...
That was a deliberate policy and deception engineered by Donald Rumsfeld. Planning was the responsibility of CENTCOM, not the Army, and CENTCOM understood full well that a Phase IV plan was required. Both CENTCOM and the Army also understood what that plan needed to look like. As this article clearly explains, their political masters had a different idea, and worked to ensure that CENTCOM would have neither the plan nor the means to execute an effective post conflict strategy. Rumsfeld thought we could just declare victory and leave.
Donald Rumsfeld and Jerry Bremer will go down in history as two of the biggest idiots to ever appear on the national security scene.
The Army has had decades long, institutional failure to think, plan, equip and train for failed state/no state ...”interventions.”
Long before Rumsfeld. Somolia and Mogadishu should of been an intituional wake up. Heck even the HW Bush ‘Rise Up Kurds’ should of meant something.
The failure lays with the Army General Staff corps.
My apologies, I had no idea that I was in the presence of a real expert. No such thing as the Army General Staff Corps. But, even self proclaimed “experts” are entitled to their opinion and yours is not without some supporters.
Rumsfeld thought that the grateful Iraqis would come together, create a new government and be our faithful allies for ever more. Had he believed we would be in for several more years of combat we probably would not have been so eager to start that fight. As I recall, he had a lot company sharing those opinions including a sizeable number of Freepers.
No thinking person ever accepts an appeal to expertness unchallenged.
What term would you use to describe the cadre, the group of flag rank officers who are charged, promoted and accept the title and responsibility of being General officers? ( A rose by another name, that kind of thing?).
And who is responsible?
You might want to check out this five part series with MG Jack Keane where he outlines the origins of the surge in Iraq — the successful military strategy he helped design, and the near zero, non, zip thought,planning, thinking that existed in the Army vis a vis post Baghdad.
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=MWU5ZDNlNmE0MzYxMWRhYWM1NWExYTY0MjEzMDNkYTI=
No thinking person ever accepts an appeal to expertness unchallenged.
What term would you use to describe the cadre, the group of flag rank officers who are charged, promoted and accept the title and responsibility of being General officers? ( A rose by another name, that kind of thing?).
And who is responsible?
You might want to check out this five part series with MG Jack Keane where he outlines the origins of the surge in Iraq — the successful military strategy he helped design, and the near zero, non, zip thought,planning, thinking that existed in the Army vis a vis post Baghdad.
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=MWU5ZDNlNmE0MzYxMWRhYWM1NWExYTY0MjEzMDNkYTI=
Watch this five part series with four star General Jack Keane. It isn’t pretty. It describes how basically Petraeus, him and a handful had to find Vietnam era operations manuals and near literally blow the dust off them. That was the state of Army thinking at the time, which basically was zero.
Rumsfeld wasn’t responsible for that.
Keane basically gives the impression that each kept to his own knitting and no one integrated or had a coherent idea, or ideas as how to proceed.
Keane is the first person I’ve seen give his view, publicly. Gut wise he’s pretty believable. Not a perfumed, managerial type General at all. He seems very down the middle of the road type.
They are called General Officers, not the General Staff Corps. But, beyond sematics, the Army Staff does not have operational responsibilities. They execute the Army’s Title 10 functions to raise and equip the force. The other services perform similiar functions for their service.
Operational responsibility rests with the Combatant Commands, not with the services. These are joint organizations, manned by officers from all of the services. Your example of Somalia can help make my point, especially since I have personal experience of that operation. At the time of the Blackhawk Down fight, the combatant commander of CENTCOM was a Marine General. His J-3, or Operations Officer was an Air Force Major General. The Commander of Joint Task Force Somalia was an Army Major General. His J-3 was a Marine. The Joint Special Operations Task Force (Rangers, SF and 160 SOAR) were under a separate command, SOCOM who reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. All of these folks, including Corporals in the Ranger Regiment well understood that the mission they had was quite risky and needed additional support. That’s why they asked for AC-130’s, tanks, and Bradley’s for just the circumstances that came into play on that October day. But, another genius politician, Les Aspin, was the Secretary of Defense, and he denied their request. He thought that the mission was to hand out MRE’s, although he had signed the orders that sent the Rangers on their dangerous errand.
I know Jack Keane, Jack Keane is a friend of mine. He is a General,not a MG. Jack Keane’s beef is with the civilian leadership at the top, though there were certainly flag officers who were quite content to go along with the nonsense issuing from Rumsfeld, Feith, and Bremer. There was no Phase IV planning because Rumsfeld personally saw to it that it was not done. He did this by removing that responsibilty from the CENTCOM staff and assigning the responsibilty to a Joint Staff planning group in Qatar. He then gave that planning group a different set of instructions that had nothing to do with Phase IV.
Correct about the rank, I knew he was four star, I just had a mental disconnect.
I was naming them as a goup, a class, What do you call them as a class, as a group? For instance there is the ...officer corps, the enlisted ranks...
Anyways..
You are lucky. I only know of him from the media, but I like him, he seems like the kind of officer I always liked. Direct, not high maintenance. He seems like he encouraged constructive criticism.
Watch the series, you can see it is discomforting to Keane to say what he said, that Rumsfeld aside, the Army as a institution, was not intellectually ready.
I remember Les Aspin, a reality disconnect delusionist that shouldn’t of been in charge of a tennis camp for chubby trust fund kids.
I think the execution, real world of the operational commands has been excellent. No military has done what ours has done, and at such low cost.
The Army uses the terms lower enlisted (E1 - E4), non-commissioned officers (E5 - E9), company grade officers (O1-O3), field grade officers (O4-O6), general officers (O7 - O10)
Keane was the behind the scenes architect of the Surge as you mention in another post. Don’t confuse this with Phase IV, or post Saddam Baghdad, it came much later after it was clear that the Rumsfeld Plan failed. Keane played a key role because he was retired and could work directly with the White House, bypassing the Pentagon. He was the go between working with Petraeus in Iraq and a few key guys in the White House. Unfortunate that we had to do that to come up with a plan to win.
Are we better off because the surge succeeded than we would have been had we left Iraq immediately after Hussein’s capture?
I am not thinking about the General officers as they see them selves, but in a more basic organizational/human form.
It seems like what I get from Keane is that the Army had very little plan wise to offer Rumsfeld. Keane said that they basically had to dust off 20 year old, Vietnam era counter insurgency manuals. Who’s fault was that that the Army, the Generals, had ignored, let waste a era so costly to the Army? It wasn’t the enlisted. It’s not the political appointees. Who does that leave?
If a individual isn’t responsible, then the group is, right?
The Iranians would of swooped in, or maybe Iraq would of turned into some sort of Cambodian killing fields. I can only guess at very bad, murderous events.
Yes, we did the right thing.
I don’t think anyone can escape getting bills, costs, burdens. People, societies that avoid them, get nowhere. They just live for a bit, then fade with nothing accomplished but filling basic appetites like cattle in a field.
You think the price we have paid was worth Sadam’s head? I don’t think it was, and I didn’t think it was in 2003 either.
It wasn’t about Saddam. No more than WWII in Europe was about Hitler.
It was about shattering the model of allowing as legitimate some ancient rule in the 21st century.
And, if not us, who? What were we going to do, have Gulf War 3 in a decade? Do what Wilson did when he left the German military/political order still intact, and then WWII another generation, under worse terms had to bleed white Europe again to finish what Wilson willfully and knowing left undone?
Further, as a national expression, most Americans do think it was worth it. There were no strikes, Congress well funded the war, there was hardly a desertion, moral stayed good, and even the Obama administration continues Bush policies.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.