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

To: KLP who wrote (241124)	3/9/2008 6:58:01 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793964

Looking back is ok, but we are getting off track. I prefer to stay focused on the way ahead. And in a nutshell this is it. Merely killing terrorists will not win a war against an ideologically motivated enemy. Especially an enemy coming from a base of 25% of the world's population; an enemy that has demonstrated the ability to recruit, operate and grow worldwide; and an enemy with a centuries old propensity to use armed warfare to settle even minor disputes. Even a cursory look at the ancient, medieval, and modern history of guerrilla, partisan, and insurgent warfare will uncover numerous examples clearly defining why it is foolhardy to risk ones entire armed forces in a hot war against an ideology. We need a new crop of senior military officers willing to shift us away from our current focus which is a priority based on direct action (direct and forceful American military intervention), in order to now give greater weight to the indirect approach to warfare, a slow and disciplined process, used by Green Beret wearing Special Forces, that calls for supporting groups or nations willing to back U.S. interests. Our enemies in the current case have a substantial and growing worldwide presence. 1% of the world's Muslim population outnumbers our US Army 30:1. The number of muslim militants is estimated at 10% of the world's Muslim population. Afghanistan and Iraq represent a mere 1% of the world's population. For 6 and 1/2 years we have substantially ignored (or applied band-aids to) every other threat emanating from the other 99% of the world. The first thing we need to recapture is our old sense of risk aversion followed by some notion of value per unit expense. Our Green Beret wearing Special Forces are born and bred for indirect warfare. It took over 55 years to hone this force to perfection. Do we really have the time and money to take another 55 years for our conventional military to develop some sort of lesser trained, inexperienced, and unproven hybrid force to replace SF? Why did we fail to ramp up Special Forces recruiting and growth when we first realized we were addressing insurgencies? Was General Doug Brown, who always insisted USSOCOM concentrate on direct action, responsible for that strategic failure? Brown spent $ Billions ramping up direct action units and ignored SF. DOD has recently spent literally $ Billions creating MARSOF and AWG from scratch. Why should we endure the outrageous expense of attempting to create a lessor qualified Special Forces "Lite", when for a fraction of the money, we could have more of the real thing. Is it reasonable to ask what are we getting? The first MARSOF Mission resulted in the team being tossed out of Afghanistan. We are about to tie up much of the USMC to create an advisory force. Has anyone looked at the disaster known as Marine Advisory Teams (MAT) in Vietnam and why that effort was abandoned on the battlefield? If the USMC is going to learn to be advisors, who is going to learn to win our battles? Even Marine Corps Commandant General Conway has complained recently of a lack of time to train for his primary mission sets. Why is he so willing to take on a mission that runs contrary to Marine battlefield doctrine? The one part of our armed forces that does need to be replaced is being ignored. It has become like a farmer's big, old, barn that has been remodeled and added to so many times, the roof sags in the middle from rotten boards and the overweight. The biggest problem with this big, old, saggy barn is we have not won a war since we built it. I am speaking of course of DOD. DOD has become the losing arm of our armed forces. After every loss, DOD grows bigger, fatter and the roof becomes saggier. Why do we need 700,000 permanent civilian employees (not including contractors) in DOD. The only way to improve something is to change it. For decades, every new DOD head coach has defined change as needing more employees. We keep replacing the DOD head coach when what we really need is a new team, a new stadium, and a new location. Let's take a lesson from our own history and recreate what won for us in the past. Replace DOD before it collapses, with a lean war department. Are we over-focused on technology? We have not yet learned how to use yesterday's hot "new" tech, much less today's "new" tech to win wars. If computers are the reason for the number of DOD employees, we should go back to manual typewriters. Before computers, we never lost a war. Since computers, we have not won a war. At this moment in our history, our military does not need more technology. It does need more unfettered brain power. We have received all the warnings. Are we going to wait until our military's back is broke clean in half before we begin to fix it. uw