William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[carl]

Those are two different issues. And the first part is not "defending excel"; excel is a tool. It's about the lack of rigorous intellect applied to military problems. This is not strongly cultivated in the officer corps until senior leadership - and only narrowly. Another poster referenced this problem implicitly with the failure of the senior leadership to understand sociology, et.al and how it fits with military science. Embarking on military campaigns in the complexity of the modern security environment without appreciating the nuances of practical understanding is both ignorant and deadly. Modern general officers are no longer galloping on horseback to break the enemy's center - they're managers of a complex multi-layered bureaucracy embedded in an tightly-woven political-economic-social fabric and engaged in a highly disruptive enterprise with long-term multi-ordered effects. There is no excuse for ignorance, especially for officers.

I'll go with using the old noodle to solve military problems. But I'm not so sure how study of things like sociology fits into it. History absolutely but not some amorphous subject like sociology. Temuchin didn't study sociology nor Scipio nor Washington nor Nelson. But they knew all about leading and motivating men in battle. To me it is most important to somehow someway find guys who have the innate ability to lead and fight rather than somehow trying to teach and put in there what they may not have. To me leadership and fighting ability is born into a man, you can hone it, but you can't put in what God didn't put there in the first place.

Nobody has galloped on horseback to break the enemy's center, high up commanders anyway, for a long time. Grant didn't and he and Lincoln both were "managers of a complex multi-layered bureaucracy embedded in an tightly-woven political-economic-social fabric and engaged in a highly disruptive enterprise with long-term multi-ordered effects."

That's a highly superficial reading of history. Care to provide any examples? Humans are pragmatic - to an extent. They're also rationalizing, which means they're better at excusing their condition than rationally improving or understanding their condition. Fuchs is right about the historical condition of women, which indicates that exclusion of women from combat is a socio-political construction rather than one based strictly on military proficiency. The destruction of mythologized forms of femininity is the greatest problem facing the integration of women in the hyper-masculine culture of the military. And this social construct is enforced through very deeply-held norms that are practiced through structurally discriminatory practices - and not just in the military, but from the moment of birth. Success in combat, like sports, is not exclusively a question of maximizing physical strength. It also requires technical skill, intellect, and moral and physical courage. Is the 'worst' male soldier more effective in combat than the 'best' female soldier?

Any examples? No, remember I said this may have been long before the long time before. But I think if you look at all the accounts we have of preliterate fighting groups from the Commaches to the Mongols to the Zulus men have done the fighting. The women stayed home with the kids. I think the whole of human history militates against the belief that men fighting and women not is a "socio-political construction". Except for one or two exceptions the women stayed home and the men fought. It strains credulity, mine anyway, to think that way back when in the time before the time before people decided to create a "socio-political construction" that didn't have a pragmatic basis.

Maybe that is superficial but maybe too some things don't need a lot of words to explain. The family dog doesn't bother the family cat anymore because it doesn't like getting its muzzle cut up. Simple.

I'll expand upon this tomorrow and explain also why going to far with the women in combat may result in coercing abortion.