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

[Dayuhan]

State Dept. 'lost' the Iraq occupation by not throwing its weight into the conflict.

I can't agree with that. State has no more capacity for "nation-building" than the military does. As far as I can determine the US Government has no such capacity, which is why the job got dropped on the military.

Slap, while Lind is my current target, he is simply a representative of a wider group of civilians who want to place the blame for the failures of the last 12 years squarely on the military. I don't care if they choose to blame us for their failures. Just don't tell me I need to fix what is not broken.

We have problems, don't get me wrong. But looking at why we failed to create a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not our problem. It was beyond the capabilities of the resources and time put against the problem.

I couldn't agree more, been chanting this mantra for over a decade: asking an army to build a nation is like asking an engineer to perform surgery. Trying to remake the army into a nation-building force is going to get you an inadequate nation-building force and is also likely to compromise the army's ability to perform its core functions, which could be a real problem if we ever actually need an army.

Even the best hammer in the world makes a very lousy screwdriver. That's not the fault of the hammer, it's the fault of those who choose to deploy the hammer because they forgot that they don't have a screwdriver in their kit.

As you say, none of this means the army has no flaws: every institution has flaws and problems, and every institution can improve. Blaming the failure of "nation-building" on flaws in the army, though, is to me both irrational and dangerous, the danger being that efforts to reshape the army to correct those hypothetical "flaws" could render the army less able to perform the functions for which it is actually intended.