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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (30218)	3/27/2003 12:56:48 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 74559

It's the Friction factor kicking in. DJ

To: LLCF who wrote (30218)	3/27/2003 4:20:26 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

General Tommy Franks, commander of the Iraq campaign, has in his curriculum one of the biggest fiascos in the US recent history according to evaluation of his own peers: The Bin Laden escape form Tora Bora, a city in Pakistan frontier. Franks was put in charge of the Central Command -an Armed Forces territory that encompasses 25 countries of the Middle East, Central Asia among them Afghanistan- to chase Bin Laden, He made at least three mistakes: The most basic was to commanding the chase from Tampa, Florida, 13.000 Km from the Afghan caves where the militant terrorist too refuge. There was no officer with a ranking higher than a colonel in Tora Bora, which made the chain of command extremely slow. Mistake number two was to put too much emphasis on air power. In this case not Franks failure alone but also of Donald Rumsfeld the defense secretary a great fan of air superiority. Michael E. O'Hanton, expert of on military strategies of Brookings Institute, says the Tora Bora fiasco showed how obvious was that this type of combat is better carried out by ground troops. Third mistake was the trust on the Afghan tribal forces. To have their support, Franks put them in charge of guarding the outgoing route towards Pakistan. There's no doubt that was through there that Bin Laden and other leaders escaped. The general looks like had not assessed that the tribal forces are corrupt and do anything for money. It's easy to understand why Franks was chosen again. He's Texan and a friend of Bush having attended the same school of Bush's wife. The other reason is Rumsfeld, Franks boss, a general without divisions. It was him who forced Franks to remake three times the strategy to invade Iraq, until it became a plan similar to the one who failed in Afghanistan with intensive use of air power.