The Pentagon is re-thinking what it's doing. Not a bad idea...anytime, but at the moment, priceless.
The AXE remembers watching a press conference from 1991, when Colin Powell and Dick Cheney made the case for keeping the Defense Department at strength for a Win-Win approach, equivalent to being able to fight and win two wars. For example, something drags us into, oh, I don't know, Afghanistan and then something drags us into, oh, say Iraq and we're cool. This replaced Flexible Response , or the ability to handle Afghanistan, and Iraq and then say, oh, something awful drags us into Mexico. Or Korea. Or Somalia. Or the Balkans. Fight the main one first, fight and win the less dangerous but still critical one next, and then crush the third opponent. The advantage of Flexible Response over Two Wars is that, well, it's flexible. The advantage of Two Wars is that it's cheap. At the time that this was being pushed, everyone was excited about the Peace Dividend. It was formulated at about the same time and as a factor in the Powell Doctrine doctrine, but seems forgotten. I can't find it on-line, the link is to an abstract from Foreign Affairs.
In fairness to Powell and the pre-cyborg-Cheney, they were advocating something startlingly different than the cluster fuck we got as shown in this link from PBS and Frontline. The whole intent was to have a force that was flexible and able to respond to just about anything.
When a "fire" starts that might require committing armed forces, we need to evaluate the circumstances. Relevant questions include: Is the political objective we seek to achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all other nonviolent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analyzed? How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?
As an example of this logical process, we can examine the assertions of those who have asked why President Bush did not order our forces on to Baghdad after we had driven the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. We must assume that the political objective of such an order would have been capturing Saddam Hussein. Even if Hussein had waited for us to enter Baghdad, and even if we had been able to capture him, what purpose would it have served? And would serving that purpose have been worth the many more casualties that would have occurred? Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do. (AXE comment and snark...Yet, here we are, largely thanks to reasonable men.)
Instead, because we're the meanest motherfuckers around, over the next 11 years, we opted under the Contract on America for being able to fight 1.5 wars. Part of this was Clinton, of course; a larger part of it was the Contract on America, and the desire to keep taxes low while balancing the budget. If you do that, great, but you can't adequately arm, train, prepare and fight for two major conflicts. Ships, planes, tanks, Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen are expensive propositions. So, the theory evolved into one small war and maybe on big war. Win-hold-then, win.
Then, of course, came 9/11. OK, accepting that the lead on the Global War on Terror should be the military -- which I do not necessarily do, by the way -- the US and our allies could probably have done something amazing in Afghanistan. Hell, we did do something amazing. I watched footage of the night drop of the Rangers into Afghanistan...we had targets, we knew where they were. The SF guys on Horseback riding down the Taliban and al Queida was incredible. However, we won the initial campaign and then went all "hold" on the battle and turned our attention to...Iraq. Which had damn all to do with anything and badly broke the services.
There was probably no alternative to invading Afghanistan and bitch slapping the Taliban and al Queida. However, we then invaded another country...that had nothing to do with the reason we were at war. The Twitshit de la Dweeb administration stumbled around making the case, but...the case was stupid from the beginning. Seriously stupid, and got us where we are. Fighting two wars that exhaust resources faster than we can replenish them, and with lots of other places we ought to be doing something other than what we are...piracy on the high seas, Somalian style law and order on the border with Mexico, and so on.
Despite his endorsement of Bush in 2004, I think Stormin' Norman's discussion of Saddam Hussein's military prowess really sums up Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Franks-Meyers-Tenet better than anyone else on this topic. Asked about Saddam in 1990, Schwartzkopf said "As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that he's a great military man I want you to know that." Before he said it, he laughed and snorted. Maybe someday we'll be able to have that reaction to Twitshit and Cheney et al as opposed to another Sunday Tourette's moment...
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