Boys, this isn't about me. It's about you.
1/4 of the men think, he's too crazy
The other 3/4's of the men think, I follow him anywhere.
Before I go forward with Mike's boys, I just ask for an endstate.
I'm not going to retire to a Washington think-tank. I refuse to live off how my boys bleed.
How does this end? My voice is pure.
There are know endstates there are only Targets and Exit points.Originally Posted by MikeF
I don't know how this ends but I suddenly feel really depressed.
"The status quo is not sustainable. All of DoD needs to be placed in a large bag and thoroughly shaken. Bureaucracy and micromanagement kill."
-- Ken White
"With a plan this complex, nothing can go wrong." -- Schmedlap
"We are unlikely to usefully replicate the insights those unencumbered by a military staff college education might actually have." -- William F. Owen
I'm wondering at the remarkable level of depression in this thread.
The overall strategic situation is not that bad, certainly far better than it was in, say, 2006-2007. Afghanistan doesn't look very good, but Iraq in 2006 was far worse.
The U.S. economic situation is ugly, but considering how much worse it could have been I think we can count ourselves quite lucky.
I mean, do you guys watch cable news or something? If so, you really should stop.
LOL - yup, that's what's doing it! Well, that and the days getting a LOT longer.
Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
Senior Research Fellow,
The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
Carleton University
http://marctyrrell.com/
That's true but I'm with Tequila
Life's good and the world's been in much worse shape on every count...
Ponies abound!
Dammit, I wanted a unicorn.Life's good and the world's been in much worse shape on every count...
Ponies abound!
They mostly come at night. Mostly.
- university webpage: McGill University
- conflict simulations webpage: PaxSims
Next Barn
or maybe the second over...
I know there's one somewhere.
Ken, your missing the point everyone is depressed because Oprah announced she is quitting her show next year.Life's good and the world's been in much worse shape on every count...
Ponies abound!
PS you doing OK haven't seen you around in awhile?
Who's Oprah?
Yep, Okay for all practical purposes -- just been a little busy and like all old folks, have good days and bad days. In true Pony rustler mode, I have more good ones than bad ones...
This type of thread is what happens when I think too muchYep, Okay for all practical purposes -- just been a little busy and like all old folks, have good days and bad days. In true Pony rustler mode, I have more good ones than bad ones.... I gotta put down the books on metaphysics, grab some salt tablets, and go PT (Ken's rules).
Mike
MikeF:
I spent a career as a planning troubleshooter. Looking at problems, trying to understand what was wrong, and trying to fix it.
Without metaphysics, I find nothing depressing about tearing things apart in order to understand them better, and how to fix them.
I took this Tomorrow Morning thing to be about asking the positive question: How do I engage this? What can I do about it?
My simplistic and perhaps overly-sympathetic view is that this war stuff comes in two flavors: Big and small.
Small Wars are, perhaps, about confined and definable problems and objectives, but could also be viewed as a mission or campaign within a bigger war.
Since WWII, however, US ability to effectively engage in big wars seems to be increasingly bogged down in inter-agency infighting, variable political/military objectives, and, as a rule, a failure of "big picture" effective engagement with the World beyond our shores. Maybe that was just because the particular problem (Viet Nam, etc...) was not easily definable or properly understood, and "muddle through" an incremental, but limited, strategy was not a path to success.
For me, immediate stability/reconstruction, rather than military/political stuff, is a definable area where positive success can be identified, planned, executed, and obtained. Closing the door of US conflict, as measured by the end of body flow, is, to me, both a positive objective, and, based on Iraq, achievable.
History cruelly shows how unstable endings, like the first run into Iraq, or the WWI settlement against Germany, lay the foundation for future conflicts, and are not really endings at all. But it doesn't look like we can affect that.
At the moment, I have been trying to absorb what I learned about Iraq, and understand what to do about it.
Yesterday, I read part of a book by Michael O'Brien, America's Failure in Iraq, where he venomously assaults the failure in 1991 to "play through" in Iraq while 500,000 troops were on the ground, then, after 2003, the catastrophic "reconstruction" effort. While I might agree with a lot of it, it seems to me that his approach is, in so many ways, neither going to engage or solve....just a venting.
Lately, I am all the more becoming interested in writing a book on Iraq that looks past and around the 2003-2010 episode, and certainly not to engage the military/political "market". In my view, there are plenty of war fighters who should properly tell the heroic and unheroic tales of war, strategy, and personal experience of those. Literature, too, should have some interesting contributions after some of these young soldiers get through college and try their first books.
But that's not my place.
Maybe it is better, first, to engage a bigger public in a more general tale about the background, rich history and challenges about the area (to create a positive context for engagement).
I started with the idea that the background is the frame story against which the US activities are explained. Funny thing is that the more I approach the research and storytelling, the less I see the US activities as important to the story. If that makes any sense????
I'm not at all depressed by the thread you opened, nor trying to figure out the Tomorrow question. I do it every morning.
Steve
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