Identifying fear

[Ken White]

This I'm not so sure of. Our ability to remove governments and occupy land was more than adequate. I'm not sure that any response capability that was desired in the 90s would have given us the ability to manage the post-occupation challenges.

Depends on what capabilities and who desired them. There was a school of thought inside the Army that urged far more effort toward managing such problems, foreign internal defense and security force assistance. There was a smaller school that advocated avoiding doing that post conflict/FID/SFA thing at all costs. They advocated tailored response and urged acquisition of equipment to do that; cheap disposable vehicles, very stealthy air transport with very long range and such in addition to major war items. Unfortunately, they got subsumed in the far larger crowd (almost half the Army was in Europe, that's where you had to go to get promoted...) who were major war / avoid FID etc crowd. As both Presidents in the 90s had no interest in any military adventures other than launching missiles -- though the first one did launch two major operations even while he was cutting the budget for the so-called 'peace dividend' -- the result was predictable. No FID, no exotic dangerous toys that might get Politicians in trouble...

"Float like a butterfly" meaning, above all, do not ever occupy territory.

I think we have to be prepared to do that while rigorously avoiding actually having to do it.

When we're clearing, we have the initiative.

Bingo! You've got it and just proved that going to the War College doesn't adequately prepare the wrong people to fight the nation's wars. That's the only time we do have the initiative, long a tenet of US doctrine. In most other circumstances, the opponent has the initiative. I've seen varying figures for Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan on enemy initiated versus US initiated contacts. IIRC, in all cases they initiated over 60% of the contacts, in some cases as high as 90%.

That is just criminal. No reason for it to be that way -- it IS that way due to poor selection and training, poor personnel polices with concomitant almost forced lack of trust in subordinates and societally induced politically correct risk aversion. Not because it must be that way, poor ROE or the bad guys knowing their terrain better...

I suppose it's restating the obvious, but I don't think we went about this in a very sensible way.

Nope, not at all. We've lost the bubble...

All the problems were foreseen by many in the Army -- problem was no one on high listened and the US has no consistent mechanism for giving civilian policy makers the requisite strategic and military knowledge to avoid make less than sensible decisions about the application of force.