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.
Showing posts with label baker report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baker report. Show all posts
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Friday, December 8, 2006
Volunteers for Victory
The Baker Report misses the point, the Sunnis want their cut of the oil money and fear the Sunnis will not only hog the profits but use it to fund pay back ethnic cleansing. The Neo-Cons want to convert the Muddle East into the Middle West with Texas style governance … where government does what it is told. The Pentagon is absorbed in rotating O-6 command slots in and out of the combat zone to blood the troops and sharpen the competition for flag rank. The only clown in the room calling for victory is W, and no one cares.
The Neo-Con penchant for privatization of warfare inadvertently coincided with the Pentagon’s long awaited plan to disarm the threat to their market position as Warriors to the World represented by the combat experienced National Guard and Reserves. This is a natural course of action for such unions as the Teamsters, AMA, ABA and plumbers union, and the Pentagon considers the military as a closed union shop with the Guard and Reserves seasonal workers at best, fit for non union jobs such as military intelligence, psychological warfare, civil affairs, logistics, etc. Better a contractor in civilian clothes getting blown away than a uniformed citizen raising the specter that the national defense can be done at one sixth the cost.
In short, W got the shorts and the GOP took up the short end in the current election. The lunatic left is foaming at the mouth at the prospect that Haight Ashbury might rise again, Woodstock reborn, and that Flower Power will reign. Talk of the draft has surfaced again despite the fundamental fact that the first trained unwilling private won’t show up on the battlefield for two years, ignoring the fact that we need trained troops for the full spectrum of rank and experience.
The principal obstacle to victory in the Muddle East is the Pentagon. Victory can be obtained by cutting them out of the action by starting a full spectrum reclassification of the civil service in the place while reallocating the office space based on relevant irrelevancy. Next the chain of command of troops in the field must go direct from the President to the commanders in the field. That will totally absorb the Pentagon and the war can be prosecuted in a professional fashion.
As for raising the needed troops, we only need to revert to the Old Fashioned Way of War … by calling for Volunteer units like the Rough Riders and asking the governors of the states to raise the necessary troops called for by the commanders in the field. A full brigade of Middle Eastern linguists could be raised here in Houston in about a month with detachments of already trained vets deployable in ninety days with the remainder deployed within nine months. They would be federalized but not in the other components which isn’t much different than currently mobilized Guard and Reserve personnel.
The Neo-Con penchant for privatization of warfare inadvertently coincided with the Pentagon’s long awaited plan to disarm the threat to their market position as Warriors to the World represented by the combat experienced National Guard and Reserves. This is a natural course of action for such unions as the Teamsters, AMA, ABA and plumbers union, and the Pentagon considers the military as a closed union shop with the Guard and Reserves seasonal workers at best, fit for non union jobs such as military intelligence, psychological warfare, civil affairs, logistics, etc. Better a contractor in civilian clothes getting blown away than a uniformed citizen raising the specter that the national defense can be done at one sixth the cost.
In short, W got the shorts and the GOP took up the short end in the current election. The lunatic left is foaming at the mouth at the prospect that Haight Ashbury might rise again, Woodstock reborn, and that Flower Power will reign. Talk of the draft has surfaced again despite the fundamental fact that the first trained unwilling private won’t show up on the battlefield for two years, ignoring the fact that we need trained troops for the full spectrum of rank and experience.
The principal obstacle to victory in the Muddle East is the Pentagon. Victory can be obtained by cutting them out of the action by starting a full spectrum reclassification of the civil service in the place while reallocating the office space based on relevant irrelevancy. Next the chain of command of troops in the field must go direct from the President to the commanders in the field. That will totally absorb the Pentagon and the war can be prosecuted in a professional fashion.
As for raising the needed troops, we only need to revert to the Old Fashioned Way of War … by calling for Volunteer units like the Rough Riders and asking the governors of the states to raise the necessary troops called for by the commanders in the field. A full brigade of Middle Eastern linguists could be raised here in Houston in about a month with detachments of already trained vets deployable in ninety days with the remainder deployed within nine months. They would be federalized but not in the other components which isn’t much different than currently mobilized Guard and Reserve personnel.
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