Night of the (Shrill) Generals
I missed
this last week on the Shrillblog. Read the whole thing; it's a shocking indictment of the Bush Administration's military strategy by 7 of our most eminent retired military leaders. Here's one quote, from Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy (Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 1997-2000), that really jumped out at me:
Rumsfeld proudly announced that he had told General Franks to fight this war with different tactics in which they would bypass enemy strongholds and enemy resistance and keep on moving. But it was shocking to me that the secretary of defense would tell the Army how to fight. He doesn't know how to fight; he has no business telling them...As he [Rumsfeld] was being briefed on the war plan, he was cherry-picking the units to go. In other words, he didn't just approve the deployment list, he went down the list and skipped certain units that were at a higher degree of readiness to go and picked units that were lower on the list -- for reasons we don't know.
Unbelievable. It's like LBJ picking bombing targets in Vietnam. It's like Churchill telling his commanders (pre-Montgomery) how to fight Rommel. It's like Hitler moving little flags around the map as the Red Army rolled from the Volga to the Vistula. In short, it's like every other damn-fool politician telling their generals how to fight throughout history; a recipe for failure, even disaster. Rumsfeld's incompetence, fortunately, had no effect on their ability to do the job they were trained and equipped for - defeating the Iraqi military. But it then doomed them to a job they're neither trained for nor equipped to do well.
Brad DeLong puts it
best:
They are the finest and best-equipped battlefield soldiers in the history of the world. THEY ARE NOT ARABIC-SPEAKING MILITARY POLICE! THEY SHOULD NOT BE USED AS IF THEY WERE ARABIC-SPEAKING MILITARY POLICE!!
