Quote Originally Posted by wm View Post
"We just need to get UBL and Mullah Omar. Then we can declare victory and bring the troops home. Look how quickly things turned around in IZ after the operation that took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That's just the ticket for AF too."
I know some will see this as simple sarcasm or pessism but there is some truth to this statement. Political expediency is often the remedy for untenable military problems like defeating the Taliban. I tend to see McChrystal's appointment in lines with this strategy of 'man hunting' and 'capture/kill' operations along with a new long-term personnel approach as outlined recently by ADM Mullen. The idea is you assign personnel to the OEF problem and they never leave. For example, an intelligence analyst is assigned to USFOR-A does a 12 month rotation and then returns to CONUS only to stay engaged on the OEF problem while back home and to eventually rotate back into OEF to bring that resident knowledge to bear... A great idea and novel concept but one that fails outside of organizations like SF Groups and SMU's... Not sure how you take a concept like that and incorporate it across four services who have long looked down at "home steading"....it just seems like a huge organizational paradigm shift that would take years vice months to accomplish.

Short term I think we will see a big push to "capture/kill" UBL, Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and other key enemy leaders while at the same time try to incorporate this long term theater specific unit focus in the conventional military... Personally, the capture/kill campaign will go off but I don't see the budget, leadership, agility, and acceptance from the conventional military services to sustain a specific unit which simply rotates in/out of theater looking at a specific problem for a sustained period of time. Yes, it works for SOF forces (both COIN and CT varities) but I don't see the USMC, USA, USAF, and USN signing up it...

PT SENDS