My questions, Galatian and ASLANSPAL, remain unanswered! What I see here is some rumblings for a few retired General officers that's not all that uncommon after the fact. All one has to do to prove that is read the wide variety of books on about past wars written by former military leaders. All one has to do is consider the conflicts of past administrations. There's always been plenty of alternative views.
However, once again just for you two, the military doesn't set national policy - it is the shield and the sword that makes it happens.
What's happening now is yet another attempt to pounce on the present administration and its policies using whatever scraps of information or resources can be rounded up. Again, some of the men were speaking out about their opinions a few years ago. One of them did so right before he was demoted and forced into early retirement.
The comments of former military leaders are always interesting. But, exactly what is the advice of these Generals that you two think should have been followed? What real tactical information was not utilized? When, where, and how did the civilian leadership "interfere" with the things the military knows best about?
I'm not asking for a repeat of generalities and unrelated events or vague complaints about the Secretary's management style. All these words - like "dereliction of duty", etc. - being tossed about are easy to claim when things don't go like you wanted them to but it's another thing to have a workable alternative. Exactly what part of the war - the combat part at which our military excels - didn't work out very well? What part of the operations were they not able to execute like they wanted to? I thought they achieved a rather solid initial victory in that respect. The second phase is working out okay if not as well as hoped. What part of that would the Generals in question, or you two for that matter, want to handle differently?
The biggest issue I've read in their comments has been about the number of troops to be committed to the war. They wanted more than they were give. So did other Generals in previous wars! They always want to mass troops, weapons, ammunition, and equipment to have the flexibility for delivering killing blows to our enemies. We did that in Iraq without the 300,000 troops requested. It's already been proved that more wasn't needed for that phase.
The present phase - that of training the Iraqi security and law enforcement forces - is being done with fewer troops. We're purposefully limiting our engagement in this effort. Our goal is to get the Iraqis to handle this work. What's wrong with this strategy? If we want to truly occupy Iraq - the alternative to what we're doing - we'd need a whole lot more than 300,000 troops. There aren't enough troops in our entire military to occupy - perform the internal security and law enforcement functions - the even half of Iraq.
The reason we have civilian leadership in the Dept. of Defense is so that they can set the overall policies. It's by design that we don't want the Generals calling those shots. Their job is to organize, train, and command troops in the execution of the missions handed to them by the President through the Secretary of Defense. Opinions of retired Generals are interesting but they don't trump the policies of the government any more than they do while they're on active duty.
Oh, by the way, ASLANSPAL, aren't you the one who often accuses me of bringing up the Viet Nam war? Why then, friend, did you bring it up in your last post? Perhaps it is you that needs to find peace from that war as well as this one?
History will decide whether the government made the right choices in Iraq. I hope they have. I hope it all works out. But, either way, just like in Viet Nam, the military will have done the best it could to execute its missions without attempting to second guess its civilian leadership. Thank God our military leaders have the discipline to continue doing that else we'd endure not only war with our enemies but internal military coups.
