Wilf, this appears to be your mission in Life.....to finish it.....so where is the book or CD?Originally Posted by William F. Owen
Wilf, this appears to be your mission in Life.....to finish it.....so where is the book or CD?
No it's not. We have all the essential work and many good Scholars have made it very accessible - Smith, Gray, Echevarria. I merely want folks to read it.
More over, to sound like a stuck record, CvC should not be read in isolation or just taken at face value. His value is as part of a broad education - and not a "How to win wars" cookbook, which is how people try and use him.
My mission, if I had one... is to get soldiers and politicians to take Military Thought seriously. War is a serious subject and it requires study.
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
And could be helped along by some books and CD's
Serious study and thought
It seems to me, and this is just my generalized thoughts on interactions with fellow officers, that the people who study war the most and take theory and strategy the most seriously are the most strident proponents of population-centric COIN. Take McChrystal and Petraues, they are frequently regarded for how intelligent they both are and their impressive amount of reading. Look at Kilcullen and Nagl, they are some of the smartest and deeply read in the field of contemporary historians.
Latest Ricks
I usually find Tom Ricks to be as mu8ch a provocateur as a journalist, but to the extent there is concern about him being a lackey of the military, his latest for Daily Beast is directly contrary.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...=hp:mainpromo2
In that article, he explains how FDR faced off against all the big boys on going to North Africa in 1943, instead of jumping ashore at Normandy.
The generals thought his goal in North Africa was just domestic grandstanding, but it accomplished a lot, including proving that the US military was not yet ready to take on Normandy in 1943, and needed an extra year of seasoning. His point, from that example, is that the generals are not always right.
The irony of all this is that we now know the generals were wrong in opposing Operation Torch—not just strategically but militarily. Roosevelt was right on both counts. It was important to Stalin that we get into the war, and doing so directly aided the Russians, by pulling German aircraft from the Eastern Front to the taxing task of supplying the Africa Corps across the Mediterranean by air. We also know now that the U.S. military was hardly prepared to fight a seasoned enemy on the ground in Europe and that it needed to take several small steps, such as amphibious landings in Africa, in order to learn how to get across the beach in Normandy much later. The defeat of the U.S. Army by the Germans at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia (remember the early scenes of the movie Patton?) provided a needed shock to the Army. Training was tightened up, and lackluster generals like Lloyd Fredendall were replaced by aggressive officers like Patton. Even then, the invasion of Sicily the following summer provided another needed shakedown, and gave American soldiers more valuable seasoning.
Last edited by davidbfpo; 10-22-2009 at 01:35 PM. Reason: Add quote marks, PM'd author already
Ricks and history is at best a lose connection. His analysis essentially boils it down to an FDR versus the US generals when that was hardly the case. The British wanted the US on the ground in the Mediterranean and would so argue successfully for the Italian Campaign with of course Anzio as a poster child event.
Simple statements like FDR was right and the generals were wrong make nice blog copy and poor history.
Tom
Concur - thanks Tom, seeing this I can ditch my 300 + word rebuttal of that simplistic and highly inaccurate statement
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
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