Countering Lind-dinistas - if the mission is impossible, don't blame me

[former_0302]

Former 302,

First off you assume that the military understood not just Nation Building but Democratization theory? Yeah, right.

Not at all. Rather, I assume that they knew that they DIDN'T understand it, and therefore should know to stay in their lane. How successful is any large organization at coming up with a way to do something that basically no one's ever done before and no one is trained how to do under fire? You might as well try to run a tank/infantry integration range with a bunch of civilians who are picking up a rifle for the first time. The result is predictable.

I am sorry, but all this arguing that the "military should have known" only goes to let the politicians, the people who REALLY should have known, off the hook.

All I'm arguing for is that the military should have known its own capabilities and limitations, and have delivered potential COAs to the policy makers which were in line with them. If the military says that it can do something that it can't, whose fault is that? If, on the other hand, they are ordered to do something while protesting that they can't do it, that's a different situation. It seems to me the former, and not the latter, is what actually occurred though. I may be in error.

In any event, I'm not excusing the politicians; they are a breed of people permanently divorced from reality. If those advising them are equally divorced from reality, however, it's something of an exponential effect of bad.

It would have been one thing if they would have let it go with "you guys suck cause you keep losing." It is another whey they say "not only do you guys suck cause you keep losing, but you are broke and you need to fix yourself before we give you another stupid mission." Sorry, not waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Perhaps what needs fixing is the civil-military relationship.

I'd agree that the civil-military relationship is indeed what is broken. I could write a novel about why I think it is, but to keep it short, it seems to me that our instant-information age and sensationalist media have made the military's job infinitely more difficult. I never let my boys take personal cameras outside the wire, precisely so that no videos or pictures ever found their way into the interwebs. But what do you do about youtube videos of Marines pissing on TB corpses? There would have been little if any rage about such an incident in WWII. Probably would have been in VN, were it possible, but it wasn't. Nowadays, the President of the US has to be concerned about what a Lance Corporal is doing. Think FDR ever gave much thought to the political ramifications of what some E2 somewhere was doing? We have so much oversight that we pay attention to all the things we can't get caught screwing up, instead of all the things that we're actually out there to do...

I'm rambling now... but to end, I just want you to understand that I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here. As I said initially, I agree with your points in the main.

[TheCurmudgeon]

I'm rambling now... but to end, I just want you to understand that I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here. As I said initially, I agree with your points in the main.

I appreciate devil in you.

I need to see where I am lacking.