The Sunday pundits meeting the press or facing the nation assert with good reason that the reasons that we as a nation face serious defeat in Iraq due to the incompetence of leadership and inability of the military to adapt to the conditions of counter insurgency. They say that the military misread the Iraqi mind, failed to have a reconstruction plan, unable to train a new Iraqi military, and obsessed with conventional war of the Cold War. The truth of the matter is that these were failures of the Pentagon, and that the services themselves had the correct capabilities and doctrine, mostly in the Guard and Reserves which were committed piecemeal and ineffectually. And in so doing, double crossed the President.
The Pentagon has a management culture and way of doing business that bears little relationship to military staff and command procedures. The military themselves are rotated in and out of the Pentagon with too short a tour to have lasting effect, likewise with most appointed officials. The real power in the Pentagon is wielded by long serving civil servants including the formidable clerical staff and the Machiavellian super-grades who maintain the continuity of policy regardless of the intent of the military and political assigned there.
As in the case of the courtiers of Versailles, the Tsar, Imperial Rome or the Forbidden City, survival depends on flattery of the powerful and on assuaging their insecurities, by raising the powerful above the decision making process which the courtier and bureaucrat is only to willing to assume. In this way, the Pentagon’s civil service treats it’s clients as a closed union shop, like ancient nobility, which excludes the lesser and less noble. Such is the case of the Guard and Reserves who are treated as seasonal workers fit only for non union, less noble work. This process, in Pentagonese, is called Transformation.
Transformation, like the Emperors New Clothes, is aimed at transforming the military from something that used to win wars against real enemies, to one that battles imaginary ones, by creating standardized expeditionary packets of troops that rotate to and from the battlefield so that every gets a crack at being up to bat. We no longer hear of campaigns like Tet, the Bulge, Normandy, or Meuse Argonne, but of Rotations 1, 2, 3 or 4. Imagine WW2 being fought with two thirds of the Army resting up for a rotation to the Pacific or the ETO.
The Pundits assert that the military doesn’t have the capacity to win this war. They do, but it’s being kept out of the fight. The solution is simple. Stop unit rotation so that the commanders on the ground can achieve a stable and consistent presence. Mobilize the necessary Guard and Reserve units as such for the duration. By pass the Pentagon by creating a direct link to a single theater commander which includes the necessary incident management system to coordinate all government agencies involved.
The real tragedy for our military is that they have never been so well trained, equippped, or led by their field commanders nor have they ever had such high morale and esprit de corps than in any previous war, far more than the "greatest generation", and that their best efforts have been tossed like used toilet paper by a wacked out puzzle palace. Even today where the troops outside the Beltway are training to best practices for Full Spectrum Warfare, inside the Beltway the golden cockroaches and embedded charlatans make a full court press to achieve "Transformation", already proven to be a prescription for defeat.
And now the Loony Left, unaware that the Third International is privatized, goes after the troops not the nuts by Shutting down JROTC in Fog/Fag City. The last time the Left got their pants in a tie-dyed twist, military retirees lost thier medical care which took thirty years to recover.
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