Quote Originally Posted by former_0302 View Post
I have a bit of a counter-argument for you. In general, I agree with most of your points... but I cannot understand how you do not view this as at least a partial failure of our military leadership. Particularly in light of the other points you make, specifically calling the mission "impossible."

1. Accepting your premise that the mission is "impossible," the question that naturally arises to my mind is who is it that should know what constitutes an impossible mission for the military?

2. If you do not know that an impossible mission is, in fact, impossible, whose fault is that?

3. If you do know that a mission you are given is impossible, but you decide to give it the old college try anyway, as opposed to, say, resigning in protest that your boss is about to spend a lot of blood and treasure in pursuit of something that you know to be impossible, whose fault is that?

The answer to all of the above is Army and Marine leadership. The answer to (1) is simply a matter of employing your troops in line with their capabilities. If you willingly employ your troops out of line with their capabilities, you should expect either failure or a miracle, the former being significantly more likely. The answer to (2) has to do with professional competence. If you don't understand that a mission is impossible, why not? Should (a) the fact that it is impossible have been obvious to you from the outset, or (b) is it that what you were doing was so far outside of both your own and others' past experience that you could not reasonably have been expected to understand the enormity of the endeavor? The answer to (3) has to do with moral courage. If you did understand the impossibility of your task, why didn't you fall on your own sword to prevent it from happening?

Personally, I think that the right answer is probably mostly in line with 2(b). However, even if that's the case, it doesn't absolve our senior leadership in totality, though more so than the other cases. In the case of 2(b), I'd say it makes them guilty of extreme over-optimism. As in, the sort of optimism which would lead someone to believe that they can cross the Pacific Ocean in a single bound...

If it's not 2(b), but one of the other cases, that leads to significantly different conclusions...
Former, first, thanks for the counterargument.

There were certainly high ranking members of the military who should have known that the plan had holes. GEN Franks high on that list. I will address that towards the end of the article.

But is War is an extension of policy, then we rely on our politicians to lay out the policy. Democratizing the middle east with a Pollyanna view of what that was going to take, and then blaming the failure to succeed on the military, I have a problem with.

We are not trained as political scientists or sociologists. We learn the art and science of war. We depend on the politicians to get the political science right. We are not in a position to tell them they got it wrong. As I have been told many times, my only option is to resign. That does not fix the problem.