Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Here's what you did:

(1) Someone criticised your clan with the allegation of failure.

(2) You respond that your clan is free of guilt because some other clan failed allegedly.
I have nothing to do with the any of the clans in question, and in my view the failure was primarily at the policy level, in selecting utterly unrealistic objectives and pursuing them with tools poorly suited for the purpose.

I do suspect that the military, at the senior leadership, could and should have explained these things to the policymakers much more aggressively. Since I'm not privy to the discussions at that level, I don't really know what was said and what the reaction was. At the operational level, of course, the officers and men involved would have had little input or choice.

Part of this whole discussion, of course, is the nature of "mission creep"... at the early stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the military leadership may not have recognized the extent to which the military would have the nation building task dumped on the military. Again, though, an honest analysis would require detailed knowledge of the discussions that took place at that time.