James Fallows at The Atlantic writes The Tragedy of the American Military. An excerpt:
Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.
Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the White House economic council, Lawrence B. Lindsey, was forced to resign for telling The Wall Street Journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the U.S. has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in many individual years.
Alexander the Great in
the Grave of Empires.
Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to allying with Sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in Iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of the world. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.S. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.
“We are vulnerable,” the author William Greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight ISIS, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” And the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats. The last war that ended up in circumstances remotely resembling what prewar planning would have considered a victory was the brief Gulf War of 1991.
After the Vietnam War, the press and the public went too far in blaming the military for what was a top-to-bottom failure of strategy and execution. But the military itself recognized its own failings, and a whole generation of reformers looked to understand and change the culture. In 1978, a military-intelligence veteran named Richard A. Gabriel published, with Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army, which traced many of the failures in Vietnam to the military’s having adopted a bureaucratized management style. Three years later, a broadside called Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era, by a military officer writing under the pen name Cincinnatus (later revealed to be a lieutenant colonel serving in the reserves as a military chaplain, Cecil B. Currey), linked problems in Vietnam to the ethical and intellectual shortcomings of the career military. The book was hotly debated—but not dismissed. An article about the book for the Air Force’s Air University Review said that “the author’s case is airtight” and that the military’s career structure “corrupts those who serve it; it is the system that forces out the best and rewards only the sycophants.”
Today, you hear judgments like that frequently from within the military and occasionally from politicians—but only in private. It’s not the way we talk in public about our heroes anymore, with the result that accountability for the career military has been much sketchier than during our previous wars. William S. Lind is a military historian who in the 1990s helped develop the concept of “Fourth Generation War,” or struggles against the insurgents, terrorists, or other “nonstate” groups that refuse to form ranks and fight like conventional armies. He wrote recently:
The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps. Defeat in Vietnam bred a generation of military reformers … Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please. |
During and after even successful American wars, and certainly after the standoff in Korea and the defeat in Vietnam, the professional military’s leadership and judgment were considered fair game for criticism. Grant saved the Union; McClellan seemed almost to sabotage it—and he was only one of the Union generals Lincoln had to move out of the way. Something similar was true in wars through Vietnam. Some leaders were good; others were bad. Now, for purposes of public discussion, they’re all heroes.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Michigan Republicans brag about their hard work trampling democracy and cutting corporate taxes:
Michigan state House Republicans are bragging about all the great stuff they've accomplished over the past two years, and it makes for ... instructive reading. "The Michigan House Republicans kept their promises to the people of Michigan," they begin, "delivering results when the state was in crisis and staying true to the guiding principles they laid out shortly after being elected into the majority."
Those guiding principles include "lead responsibly in all our endeavors, making state government answerable to the public and respectful of its wishes." Yet the long list of things Michigan House Republicans are bragging about includes the anti-union law rammed through during the lame duck session over massive protest, and very much against the wishes of the public.
Other things Michigan Republicans are proud of include "provid[ing] better job security for Michigan's best teachers through nation-leading teacher tenure reform." That would be their doublespeak for ending the provision that firing or demoting a teacher require "reasonable and just cause," downgrading teacher job security to allow them to be fired for anything short of "arbitrary and capricious" reasons. In addition to making it easier for administrators to fire teachers for almost-arbitrary reasons, Michigan Republicans are proud to have "expand[ed] school choice and cyber school opportunities." Cyber schools are a big failure, with one study finding that just 30 percent of them meet minimum progress standards under No Child Left Behind, compared with 54.9 percent of regular schools.
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On
today's Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin brought us a far-flung roundup, including MTV & birthrates, polling on race issues plus 2016, racism vs. racial bias. Obama: lame duck, or honey badger? TN & Medicaid expansion, plus S-CHIP up for renewal in 2015. The latest airline disaster. And the worst media fails of 2014. Guess who wandered a WalMart with BB guns & lived to tell the tale? They do Christmas differently in Texas, I guess. And
PolitiFact's year-end roundup of the worst of political Internet memes. "Pants on Fire" doesn't even begin to cover some of these.
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