Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
I said Moorer was an imbecile? No I did not but he clearly made an imbecilic decision.
To you it is clear, others without your vast knowledge, experience and inside information do not know enough to make that call...

You may, however, make as many standing broad jumps at possibly wrong conclusions as you wish.
One must surely question how this man reached the pinnacle of the US military without it being established that he was unable to make (in this case) an intelligent decision under stress.
I suspect that he did it like countless others around the world before and since -- by making more, mostly intelligent decisions involving far more persons while under stress than you or I ever had to do. Note also that we do not know that the decision was not intelligent, we only have your assumption based on limited information that it was unitelligent.

Note also that you're basing your possibly fallacious assumption on one incident of which you are but partially aware and informed as opposed to possessing (or citing) more detailed knowledge of his over 40 years of service in which, among other things, he was both CinCPac and CinCLant, two major commands and something no one had ever done before (or since...).
Ken, how did Moorer manage to get to CJCS when his was unable to make a simple decision a 15 year old could make and does this indicate the the joint chiefs are merely rubber stamp yes-men?
The 'how' is discussed above. You do not know that it was a simple decision, it merely suits your purposes to so assume. Been my observation that 15 year olds make a lot of hasty --and bad -- decisions. Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs are like ordinary mortals, some are yes men, some are not. All have far more military experience than you, most good, in more areas of the world and more varied circumstances. Most also have more sense than to leap to judgement based on limited knowledge and most are concerned with far more than minor tactical problems. They can be legitimately accused of being excessively cautious but it must be recalled that they are dual hatted as both the military adviser to the President (not Commanders, they command nothing) AND as guardians of the institutions that are the entire US Armed Forces with worldwide and not just current Theater (or current political administration) concerns. Those are somewhat conflicting roles and the balance is always uneasy.
For the OBL strike it was troops from stateside that were used and not those based then in theatre? A pattern here?
That too is an assumption and not necessarily correct.

However, you raise a good point. The Cabanatuan raid was ordered by the local commander using in-theater troops. There were some unheralded but deep and successful raids in Korea that met those same parameters. Son Tay, OTH was the harbinger of excessive control from Washington and of the use of out of theater forces. That raised those efforts from a military operation to a political action (please note and consider that FACT). As was / is the OBL effort. The OBL thing was a mixed bag, theater wise but was emphatically a Washington orchestration. I suspect little good will come from that trend...