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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (201475)	4/4/2007 8:33:05 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793670

"The Army is not flexible enough or well trained enough to win a counterinsurgency." Someone once said that the Army is doomed to chronicly prepare for the last war, and not the next war. In essence, as junior officers rise, they continue to focus on the strategy and tactics they learned during their time "in the trenches". As the Powerline author rightly points out, there have been innumerable missteps and mistakes in this war. Many mistakes have been due to commanders inexperienced at COIN. However, I feel we have come to the point at which the cream has begun to rise to the top- the point at which our purpose is more clear, our mistakes are fewer, and our flexible, bright commanders control the field of battle. Sorry - feelings don't win wars and we still only control only bits and pieces of the battle area, and we only control them temporarily. The part that we are ignoring is the part that is killing us - the infiltration routes from Syria and Iraq. "Then there's the domestic political situation which I won't rehash except to say that it's crippling to the war effort. … Would, should, any rational person bet his life helping CF when you're expecting them to leave at any time?" This is the one point of the article on which I agree 100% with the author. Why indeed would you fight alongside the soldiers that will leave when you need them the most? Why would you care if the temporary occupiers of your fields are blown apart by IEDs? Why would you devote your tribe's men, time, and treasure towards the success of a government that you expect to fall as soon as the Americans leave? Indeed! He gets it. Importantly that thought is now drifting through the minds of our fiercest warriors who also happen to make up our only COIN trained force. I give SF reports a lot of weight because every ODA has linguists and they work with the civilian population every day. They have continuous opportunities to assess attitudes and they do not BS anybody. Tonight begins the 4th anniversary of the battle of Baghdad. FOUR FN YEARS and the entire American Armed Forces have not tamed this one city. To put this in context, it is more than four times longer than from DDay to the fall of the Third Reich. This problem is bigger than Petreaus' skillsets.