Sounds like the military brass are as incapable of performing their duty to advise, warn, etc their Commander in Chief properly as Bush & Co are incapable of coming up with plans for the military that are based in reality. As Yingling said in his Armed Forces Journal article, “Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character.”
Normally, you get what you pay for means pay too little and you get crap. We’re paying through the nose for the Pentagon and still getting crap.
US officer condemns Iraq strategy
A senior serving US army officer has launched a scathing attack on the US military leadership in Iraq.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling said US generals had failed to prepare their troops properly and had misled Congress about the resources needed for the war.
Writing in the Armed Forces Journal, he said the US had repeated the mistakes of Vietnam and so faced defeat in Iraq.
Such criticism from a serving officer is rare, analysts say, although several retired generals have spoken out.
Lt Col Yingling’s remarks come a day after the top US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, described the situation in Iraq as “exceedingly complex and very tough”.
“For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces, and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of the security conditions in Iraq,” he wrote.
The generals had gone into Iraq in 2003 with too few soldiers and no coherent plan for post-war stabilisation, having spent a decade “preparing to fight the wrong war”, he said.
“The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship.”
A case could also be made that military leaders are attempting to distance themselves so Bush’s failures don’t rub off on them. Too late.
The long-term future of Iraq cannot be decided in Washington by Americans. The future must be decided by the Iraqis. So the question is can they do it? I believe that they can, and they will. The goal is reconciliation, and after all the hatred Saddam infused in the country this process will take decades to reach maturity, and U.S. provided security can only go so far towards meeting this goal.
You all know I’m against this war. But some interesting news has been basically ignored by the media, because I assume it doesn’t fit in with their agenda, which is a complete withdrawal from Iraq.
I like all sides of an issue covered, my side and the other guys. Sometimes the other guys can change my view on a subject based on something I didn’t know before. This is a good thing.
So, in that spirit, lets actually look at the poll the left cites as a basis for not giving Bush the money for the surge.
The left and the media have been making a lot of noise about the 59% who now think (for the first time a majority) that the war was a mistake.
And the 70% who think Bush mishandled the war (duh). What the left and the media are sort of ignoring from the poll is this……….
61% want the congress to give Bush the money to allow him to deploy the troops for the surge, without time tables.
47% still say the U.S. will definitely or will probably win the war in Iraq.
Only 16% actually want the troops brought home immediately.
31% want a time table of at least 12 months for the troops to come home.
30% want to take as long as is needed to stabilize Iraq before withdrawing.
The best one is this one though. After all of the crowing by the Democrats about how the American people want them to do this or that…. it seems they really don’t.
36.4% approve of the new Democratic controlled Congress. This is 2% higher than approval for congress before the November election.
An amazingly low % considering how much the media has been giving the Democrats huge play daily.
Bush is still in the 30′s
35.6% approve of Bush’s job performance. Seems he and the Congress are almost equally dismal.
I forgot to say in post #22……what the very low numbers for congress and Bush show is that most Americans understand they have no one who is providing real leadership for the most powerful nation on Earth.
I’ve read a couple pieces this w/e about **the vision thing** as Bush Daddy used to call it. I’m seeing it come up a lot in Obama articles, and to be frank, it scares the crap out of me.
Apparently no one remembers that the present Bush, had the **vision** thing….a compassionate society, etc, etc, blah blah. The media used to gloss over his lack of political and government experience with things like….he will have help, he will learn it as needed, he visited Mexico once.
This is exactly the same crap the media is spouting about Obama. While he gives a good speech, and ooooozes the **vision** thing, he is not what a nation facing it’s own mortality needs to lead it. We face grave future crises with Islamic terrorism, economic competition, energy problems and all the rest……do we really want to hand it all to a guy who has been a Senator for 2 years, and a state Representative for 6 years??
I think a lot of people need to snap out of the American Idol mood face facts before we have another 4 years of disasters.
> Normally, you get what you pay for means pay too little and you get crap.
> We’re paying through the nose for the Pentagon and still getting crap.
…
> A case could also be made that military leaders are attempting to
> distance themselves so Bush’s failures don’t rub off on them. Too late.
The dilemma the Generals faced before the war was a difficult ethical issue, and you declare the whole lot to be “crap”? The competence, honor, and professionalism of our military officer corp is second to none. Many of them have graduate degrees, they have fought in combat and overcome, and, yes, many of them “saw the distaster coming.”
The problem is that the civilian government runs the military. Rumsfeld and his minions overrode the war planners at every turn. General Franks and Myers are to blame for giving in to their stupid ideas, but that does not paint the whole Pentagon as crap. Meanwhile, at the same time you are attacking the Generals for not coming forward, there are other academics attacking those who have spoken out for undermining civilian control of the military.
Many activist/anarchist types seem to have a hard time understanding the meaning of duty and following orders. These are crucial to the functioning of any military, and intelligent officers do not just throw them out the window because they have doubts. They also have families, and a duty to their own units, to not throw their careers away because higher-ups did not stand up to the administration.
The 4-star generals who dealt with Rumsfeld and the president are to blame. They took the critical principle of civilian control too literally, and as Rumsfeld slowly manipulated Franks to reduce the size of the force, none of them put their foot down to say the success of the mission was being risked by Rumsfeld’s meddling. As the top commanders in the military, they should have put their careers on the line to tell the truth. And yet there would have been an uproar of “traitor” and breaking the principle of civilian rule. There is actually a high probability they would have just been fired, replaced, and Rumsfeld and Cheney still would have had their way.
So for any 3-stars or lower to do this would have been foolish. Those officers with the courage to do it are exactly the kind we need on the battlefield leading our troops and making the best of a bad situation. It’s another failure of the administration that they stuck with mediocre generals like Sanchez and Casey, and we didn’t get Petraeus until it’s too late.
Let’s blame the leaders who failed, not the entire military.
You take the article’s title and swap the war in iraq with anything (current day corporate world, world governments, economy planning, etc.) and it would make no difference.
IOW: the title sums up the root of modern day society’s problems