American experts confuse me again and again.“Rumsfeld got war and transformation only half-right,” says Richard H. Shultz Jr., the director of international security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy near Boston. “He was right that the lethality and speed of a military advance could be transformational, but he didn’t realize that the enemy might have an answer to that in the form of a war after the war.”
How can this person be cited (obviously implying that he's an expert on the matter) if he is so clueless?
Manstein advanced 300 km in the first three days of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, with tanks that did at most 40 km/hour and Soviet opposition that was decidedly more serious than the Iraqi appeared to be. The terrain was much more complex and much more often a closed one. The availability of air support was much smaller, as his corps was only one of dozens.
Other examples of advances like 80-110 km/day existed throughout 1940-1942.
So if the advance speed of the U.S./coalition forces in 2003 was decidedly inferior to a 1941 advance speed - wouldn't his comment imply that the transformation would be a "Back to the past" move at best?
No, this Mr. Shultz is just clueless.
He's talking about the obvious without sufficient background to value the achievements correctly. Don't ask lawyers about anything else than law...
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