The President’s new plan for winning in Iraq, released on January 10 came in three different pieces, the Wehnergram introducing LTG Petraeus and FM 3-24 Counter-Insurgency came first. Then the Iraq Fact Sheet that showed the influence of the Pentagon in mitigating the loss of control FM 3-24 would have on personnel management policies including Rotational Warfare ensuring the rotation of O-6 command positions, and an increase in the size of the Regular Army, thus ending the threat of a competent National Guard and Reserve force. The third was the President’s speech which, in my view was the most Presidential presentation he has made since taking office, but unaware that his plan has already been emasculated.
Without a CORDS, Petraeus will trip and get entangled in the ganglions of Beltway politics and turf wars in the Palais Pentagon. CORDS (Civil Operations and Rural Development) was the result of President Johnson’s demand that all the agencies in Vietnam get their act together. Just agreeing to meet and hash out differences didn’t work, and the mish mash they hatched serves as the basis for reasons for our defeat in Vietnam. CORDS got those disparate agencies under one roof and enabled the civilian agencies to obtain resources from the military they previously could only dream about.
CORDS was effective and in three years the Viet Cong/NVA were driven away from the populated parts of Vietnam.
Unity of Effort is a basic principle in love, war, business and politics. FM 3-24 lays down the ways that this can be achieved in a coalition environment. It doesn’t necessarily mean one super leader. The National Incident Management System (NIMS) creates a framework for multiple agencies including volunteers to have a unified effort. What has been happening in Iraq is a repeat of Desert One where interagency rivalry sabotaged the hostage rescue attempt in Iran. Coordination regardless of hat size made the difference between New Orleans ability to react to disaster and Houston’s.
LTG Petraeus must be given the kind of authority and mechanisms to create a NIMS and/or CORDS-like structure, or W will be impeached by Christmas.
And that’s the least of our worries.
Showing posts with label Bush Doctrine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush Doctrine. Show all posts
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Bush's Bad Rap
Bush and Rumsfeld are taking the wrath of the chattering classes on the nose and the mass defection of the willing and supportive. Military punditry posits courses of actions tagged Go short, go big, go long, or get out. All seem to accept the status rotative that destabilizes any effort regardless of intent. Some say that the US military was trained for the wrong war and can’t fight the right one. It is true that Rumsfeld announced on Saddams fall that the Ghost of Vietnam was dead and that the Transformed Light Fantastic had won.
It is true that Transformation wasn't Rumsfeld's idea, and the evil that it has wrought would have visited itself upon either Democratic Presidential candidate had either of them won. There was, and is, a sinister synergistic effect between the Pentagon's union protectionism of Elitist Warriorism and Neo-Conservatism's fetish for privatization. Both don't want Warriors to do un-warrior non-union jobs like logistics, intelligence, civil affairs and military government, psychological operations, or military police.
The Pentagon's penchant for stabilized unit rotation to maintain Warrior unit cohesion has necessitated unstabilized rotation and cohesion in non-union jobs and defeated the attempts of the Warrior class to maintain stability in Iraq and would have done so with the proper ratio between troops and Iraqis. What is a tribute to the quality of the leadership of the troops in the field is the ability to function efficiently with remarkable effectiveness given the chaotic state of the command, control, and support structure in support of the rotating brigades.
The definitive study on psychological war "Cohesion and Disintegration of the Wehrmacht" by Berelson and Janowitz held that as long as the troops' primary group was intact and a basic faith in Germany remained, the troops would fight on. A primary group is rarely larger than a company. The concept of unit rotation for combat units benefits from this principle, but the process of derivative "units" cherry picked from the Guard and Reserve can only be interpreted as an attempt to wreck the reserves. Nice try, but our Guard and Reserve troops have weathered this and have soldiered on with an attendant cost in PTSD.
The disintegration of Iraq can be reversed by reversing the rotation of units and mobilizing the proper command structure for stability operations from the Guard and Reserves as intended by the Congress and all previous planning. In short, go there and come back with their shields or on them. This is war, not a live fire exercise.
It is true that Transformation wasn't Rumsfeld's idea, and the evil that it has wrought would have visited itself upon either Democratic Presidential candidate had either of them won. There was, and is, a sinister synergistic effect between the Pentagon's union protectionism of Elitist Warriorism and Neo-Conservatism's fetish for privatization. Both don't want Warriors to do un-warrior non-union jobs like logistics, intelligence, civil affairs and military government, psychological operations, or military police.
The Pentagon's penchant for stabilized unit rotation to maintain Warrior unit cohesion has necessitated unstabilized rotation and cohesion in non-union jobs and defeated the attempts of the Warrior class to maintain stability in Iraq and would have done so with the proper ratio between troops and Iraqis. What is a tribute to the quality of the leadership of the troops in the field is the ability to function efficiently with remarkable effectiveness given the chaotic state of the command, control, and support structure in support of the rotating brigades.
The definitive study on psychological war "Cohesion and Disintegration of the Wehrmacht" by Berelson and Janowitz held that as long as the troops' primary group was intact and a basic faith in Germany remained, the troops would fight on. A primary group is rarely larger than a company. The concept of unit rotation for combat units benefits from this principle, but the process of derivative "units" cherry picked from the Guard and Reserve can only be interpreted as an attempt to wreck the reserves. Nice try, but our Guard and Reserve troops have weathered this and have soldiered on with an attendant cost in PTSD.
The disintegration of Iraq can be reversed by reversing the rotation of units and mobilizing the proper command structure for stability operations from the Guard and Reserves as intended by the Congress and all previous planning. In short, go there and come back with their shields or on them. This is war, not a live fire exercise.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Sunday Punditry misses the point
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.
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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