Posted on 02/28/2011 6:45:35 AM PST by Racehorse
As he winds down a remarkable Pentagon career – overseeing two long and very costly wars, wrestling with a military-industrial complex resistant to his budget moves aimed at questionable weapons, and shaking up the senior officer corps – Defense Secretary Robert Gates has a message for his successor.
“Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it.”
[SNIP]
“We can’t know with absolute certainty what the future of warfare will hold, but we do know it will be exceedingly complex, unpredictable, and – as they say in the staff colleges – ‘unstructured’,” he said. “Just think about the range of security challenges we face right now beyond Iraq and Afghanistan: terrorism and terrorists in search of weapons of mass destruction, Iran, North Korea, military modernization programs in Russia and China, failed and failing states, revolution in the Middle East, cyber, piracy, proliferation, natural and man-made disasters, and more.”
“And I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect,” he quipped. “We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more – we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”
“There has been an overwhelming tendency of our defense bureaucracy to focus on preparing for future high-end conflicts – priorities often based, ironically, on what transpired in the last century – as opposed to the messy fights in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
That leaves just Europe and South America..................
Can SOMEONE in that admin keep their frickin’ mouths shut and ADVISE the President and go home. WHY do we have to make news all the time!!!
When you don’t fight a war to win it, the outcomes are fairly predictable. We haven’t done that since 1945.
Well, as everybody who watched The Princess Bride knows, the First Rule is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
However, if we ditch some of the more moronic rules of land warfare that seem to be designed to prevent us from winning, the ME is perfectly doable...
Bush’s choice and Obama’s - a loser.
Instead of saying we should avoid a war, he should have said we should avoid PROLONGED POLICE ACTIONS in countries where our presence is not appreciated or wanted.
America, given the fickle nature of its voting populace, should ONLY fight blitzkrieg like wars - using overwhemling military technology and force to totally smash an opponent and his infrastruture into dust and then pull out. Let someone else pick up the pieces - its not our damn job to be the fixer-upper of the world. Our military should only be employed in the event our strategic interests or those of a VALUED ally - like Israel, are at stake. And only then when they are opperating in a situation of military advantage.
Prolonged police actions are expensive, bloody, raise public opposition and are counterproductive.
LOL!
You forgot North America, ie, Obama's war on the United States.
“Gates’s warning: Avoid land war in Asia, Middle East, and Africa”
My warning: Avoid ‘democracy building’ in Asia, Middle East, and Africa where tribal chiefs and mullahs are it.
Or we could declare war on Canada.......................
MacArthur did warn about getting involved in a land war in Asia but Gates is a far cry from a MacArthur....he’s been nothing but a “yes” man. Someone must have given him notes for the speech. He’s just not that smart.
So, we’ve been spending billions and billions of dollars on whiz-bang weapons systems of questionable utility, but are incapable of successfully pursuing the actions - fought with manpower and off-the-shelf hardware - that we’re faced with in the real world as it exists...
But Defense Contractors and their pet Congresscritters are getting rich, so it’s okay....
/sarc
Seems if he believes this, then must advise Obama to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now.
Robert "Strange" McNamara
If you like THAT one, then go over to the "Low flow toilets causing a stink in SF" thread - I put a Seinfeld "Low flow...I don't like the sound of that!" there.
Canada, U.S. agree to use each other’s troops in civil emergencies
By Ottawa Citizen ^ | February 22, 2008
Posted on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 5:19:41 AM by DeaconBenjamin
Canada and the U.S. signed an agreement that paves the way for either nation to send troops across each other’s borders during an emergency. Some question why the Harper government has kept silent on the deal.
Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, signed Feb. 14 in Texas.
The U.S. Northern Command publicized the agreement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan, which allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a civil emergency.
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