Quote Originally Posted by 120mm View Post
Actually, it's time to get the God Damned medical corps out of the business of making what are in effect tactical command decisions about what armor a soldier wears.
Neither the U.S. Army Surgeon-General nor his Medical Department run the U.S. Army -- but the conbat arms gunfighters in positions of high command do. The current policies on force protection go back to around the end of the Vietnam conflict, when senior leaders came to believe that mounting casualties would undermine public support for operations overseas.

What has been missing from the operational equation for around 40 years, maybe longer, has been achieving decisive results in a hurry. To an extent force protection and the desire to appear to be "reasonable" about the use of military force undermine our ability to get the job done in a decisive manner. There have been disconnects between strategic goals and the military operations used to achieve them; for domestic political reasons we decide to "do something" with military forces but then we don't think through the ends and means.