The Tragedy of the American Military

Consider this, from the article:

Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military.

The military is the only institution among those mentioned that has not been overtaken and fundamentally transformed by the Left. The philosophy of the Left and its ability to attract the weak and the hedonists has destroyed American Institutions and continues to do so today. They are working hard to bring their deadly disease to the one institution that up until the Obama Administration has successfully resisted infection.

What’s in a name? The Affordable Care Act, really? It’s a political cover. Think of the number of jihadists who are now six feet under. We’ve creamed a ton of radicals and they aren’t coming back to fight another day. Our kill ratios are on the order of 100 to 1. That’s unprecedented.

We’ve set the jihadists and Muslim radicals back a half century. SA is “liberalizing”. This is a long war and will be won over a period of generations. Freedom and knowledge will see to it.

Its about the all out determination to win at any cost, the unquestioned committment of the government at the top to win, and the total unity of the country to save it from totalitarianism. All of which are absent today.

This is a different country today. A big part of the problem is that nobody -- including the government or the citizenry -- can possibly have a "commitment to win" when nobody knows what the heck we're trying to achieve.

Hussein needed to go and his sons needed to go. However, we went in without really looking at the strategic ends and how to achieve them. I’ve personally chatted with one of the war planners, and OIF was a clusterf**k from the outset.

Example:

One of the national strategic goals was to have the Iraqis take over their own country quickly and run all command and control thus allowing us to exit quickly. However, I’m sure you remember the famous “shock and awe” campaign. What was its purpose? The destruction of the entire Iraqi command and control network. Also, the decision was made (I don’t know by who, I assume Bush) to disband the Iraqi military. So who was going to run the show? What were those former Iraqi Soldiers going to do now? The foreign invaders smashed their military and fired anyone they didn’t kill, now what were they going to do for money? Hence a major piece of the wonderful insurgency we dealt with for almost a decade. These decisions matter, and they were some bad decisions.

That’s not even getting into the internal military problems with regards to building progress year-to-year versus each higher-level officer trying to reinvent the wheel so as to get a better OER. In Iraq and Afghanistan we fought a dozen or so one-year wars, not a 12-year war.

I don’t necessarily think that we shouldn’t have gone in to Afghanistan or Iraq, but we sure as hell should’ve had a better clue what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Bremer famously remarked to a colleague on his way out the door to Iraq that he’d see his colleague by Christmas. His colleague had a better grasp of what was about to happen and told Bremer we’d be lucky if we got out of there in 10 years.

There are some legitimate points in this article, but there are some significant oversights in it and it meanders way too much.

First, he talks about the draft and how Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft. He speaks of Rangel in terms of a guy who was looking to enable success and bridge the civilian-military divide. What he doesn't mention is that Rangel voted against his own bill to help defeat it. It was simply a political ploy to try to paint Republicans as desperate for more service members and even willing to draft people to do it! Pure posturing that was pathetic then and is pathetic now.

The author also meanders a lot in his criticism of this civilian-military divide, particularly with his bitching about the F35. While it's well-established that the program is basically a disaster, what does that have to do with anything? Congress sets the parameters the military has to work within to acquire equipment. I've seen the broad strokes of the acquisition process. It's unbelievably complex. The Air Force, in particular, has officers who spend their entire careers doing nothing but that job. The Army tosses it out like an extra duty, basically, and the results show. If Congress was serious about shoring up the acquisition process while streamlining it for useful purposes rather than counting pennies while wasting $1000s, they could. But they won't.

Lastly, a big part of the author's complaint seems to hover around an inability to criticize the military and how it does things. I haven't seen any such limitations. The press loves to criticize how we do things. If there's an issue with a lack of knowledge base in the press, how is that the military's problem? Ultimately, this smells like a 1960s/1970s jackass that longs for the days of screaming at and spitting on returning Soldiers.

In Vietnam we started throwing away victory in order to in the end help the other side. We are doing it again now.

In the immortal words of Tom Moorer, when you asked him about the media coverage in Nam, he would growl: "Seems like they turned all our victories into defeats." Then a Dem Congress finished the job. As pointed out by Jean Jaques Servan-Schreiber in "The American Challenge," Ho Chi Minh won the war on the American campuses and in our media. Now, under the current [lack of] leadership, we're doing it again.

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