“Shake Up the Army, Dave”

Commentary ^ | Peter Wehner

[csmusaret]

If our policy is/was to invade every country with a despotic leader why did we quit?

[TADSLOS]

If our policy is/was to invade every country with a despotic leader why did we quit?

Out of mutual respect?

[Leisler]

I think we more used to. From Boston to California, countless savage tribes, and the Civil War. We were, once, a more revolutionary, idealistic, even physical country. Now, we are more managerial, less physical, more materialistic.

We used to be a nation of younger people, now our average age is older.

I don’t know if we have quit either. Maybe it is a case of so many enemies, so little time.

I wouldn’t mind if we had a Department of Thug Overthrow.

[Tainan]

This type of warfare was much discussed back in the late '70s. At that time it was referred to as "Low Intensity Warfare"...for lack of a better term. The concept was 'new' to the American military way of thinking. Of course, although the value of small unit 'hearts & minds' operations had been shown for a couple of decades, it was still a very radical consideration and mainstream mil brass hats were still determined that the standard 'European' theater type conflict was the way it would always go.
Basically they just hated the idea of giving up direct 24/7 hands on control that was/is the nemesis of small unit ops.
Then along came the Central American dust-ups and slowly the mind-set began to change. Along with the retirement of the top brass hats.

From 'Low Intensity Warfare' the name has changed several times, new acronyms as new people toss-in their "new best ideas" and things evolve. But smallish wars in dirty places fought against politically messy factions who have the benefits of blending in with the fishes are whats been on-tap for 25 yrs or so and will be a part of life for the present and future.

Fight 'em like you have to.

[Leisler]

I can understand the Army not wanting to devolve into a colonial constabulary. And I get the nature of the Army being a engineering, mechanical, logistic force, and not a bunch of Harvard anthropologists.

But the strife, the oil, the choakpoints and most importantly the people( ultimate resource IMO ) are in the messy places.

Putting idealism aside, this is were the fastest market/economic growth could and has occurred.

In short I advocating for a more systemic, studied military intervention and support, a la El Salvador. I don’t accept the imperialist label laied at our interventions in the Caribbean, Central America and the Philippines.

Where would the American West be, or have become, with out hundreds of years of military intervention, politics, engineering and even war? I think that the military should more embrace that heritage. Of course that is built upon the notion of America being a force for good in the world, which as we all well know is not held by a small yet influential percentage of our population. ( I wish dueling would come back )

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks neverdem.

Those were the words of Pete Schoomaker, then chief of staff of the Army, to General David Petraeus, who at the time (2005) was commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The context of Schoomaker's remarks was that the war in Iraq, which had been going on for more than two years, wasn't going well. The trajectory of events was, in fact, alarming. So Schoomaker tasked Petraeus, the leader of a group of intellectual-warriors in the Army, to rethink our counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The job was to determine the right overarching concepts and intellectual underpinnings of the war -- and then to put them into practice.