Doubtless a brilliant writing....

Current warfare would be at odds with current American Culture if this nation were populated by a population of Ron Paul's and Cato's with an insistence on strict constitutional interpretation and a sense of civic virtue, said majority being joined by a moderate number of liberal theology catholic priests and nuns, and the ever present hippy (the real type, not the pseudo hippy in an suv). An America like that would be at odds with warfare.

As it is, interventionist, voluntary warfare hits on a number of aspects of American culture, not that they are in harmony with one another.

1. American Messianic Exceptionalism- we are going to educate every little girl and make sure she votes. We might blow up some stuff in the meanwhile, and maybe even enjoy it a little, but we are a brute with a heart of gold. Jacksonian (htW. Meade) thuggery aside, there is the idea amongst serious folks we "need" to do something "over there." (ht Mr. Kipling)

2. $ and the importance of public-private partnerships (i.e. sleazy nepotism)

3. Bigger is better, and everyone likes a good show. Shock and awe, ya'll. But even war gets boring after awhile, Americans' attention span is notoriously short and only misanthropic grumps like to be down on everything. Let's keep looking forward.

3. Those other Americans aren't doing their part. I say we cut funding for their libraries and use it for roads in Afghanistan, for people who really would appreciate it. Americans love to hate other Americans and call each other unAmerican. Chomsky's right, only in the US and USSR are you able to get by with this b.s. His example, accuse someone of being un or anti-Norwegian, it's patently ludicrous. Ok, we are founded on an ideal, but still.

On the statement:
"Americans designed and purchased weapons systems to fight the war they wanted to fight, not the war they were most likely to fight."

I get what the writer was driving at from a tactical level, but strategically speaking, this nation has rarely fought a war that was not of it's own choosing. And we are most likely to fight ongoing idiotic ventures because of the pathological messianic bellicosity that permeates our sense of ourselves. I say this because the writer's criticism of Elder Bush isn't entirely fair. Sure, Bush screwed the pooch after the USSR died, but the nation (or a large percentage of Americans) wouldn't have let him do something visionary. For example, Bush mildly criticized Israel and look at the flack he got. Jimmy Carter wore a sweater, and people still whine about that. The executive is powerful and can create messes. Unfortunately, because of American cultural pathologies, it can rarely fix them.

Adrian Lewis’s book is an outstanding book though somewhat expensive even on Amazon.com. Lucky for Tom I suspect he doesn’t have to shell out for his copy. Yes, I am green with envy.

Tom’s well selected excerpt from the book, "Ultimately, a national, citizen-soldier army is the only guarantee of the security of the nation from external threats, and the only means to ensure that the nation fights just wars." Is in my view along with Rubber Ducky’s and Lewis’s absolutely true. A new National Service Act should receive strong support from all politicians, radio blabbermouths and TV talking heads that never miss an opportunity to boast about their patriotism and love country.

Tom’s other quote from Lewis’s book is in my view close to being right but not entirely so, “Limited war is only limited at the operational and strategic levels of war." In ‘limited’ war even at the tactic level we sometime place a restraint upon our fighting forces that in full-scale war we might never chose to do. Reconnaissance by fire is a full-scale war practice something in a limited war we might be more hesitant to apply. The circumscribed use of light infantry weapons to reply to insurgent fire from a village would in full-scale war likely be done by an intense artillery barrage leveling the place.

I’m looking forward to reading this book. I fear, however, that well-reasoned arguments from the likes of Dr. Lewis or Dr. Bacevich are simply not powerful enough to stop the consumptive madness that this country now relies upon. Having constructed the most formidable fighting force on the face of the planet, good Americans will be willing to stretch their democratic principles (and all those other flexible moral teachings) to the breaking point to ‘preserve-and perhaps even expand-the American way of life.’ Looking for a partial solution? Try parking the car. As mundane and ordinary as it seems, until we address our oil-addiction, nothing will change with this country’s foreign/military policy.

"Pops" at the elder President Bush are rare now primarily because his son provided dramatic examples of how many other ways a President can screw up. The elder Bush, who did have some significant foreign policy achievements to his credit, looks good by comparison, as does Reagan, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, Taft and almost everyone else who has ever occupied the Oval Office.

But the record is clear enough. After presiding with skill and discretion over the collapse of the Soviet empire and the restoration of freedom to eastern Europe, the elder Bush had no more ideas in the foreign policy field than he had in domestic policy (he never really had any in domestic policy, which was the major reason he could not get re-elected). Bush was passive and reactive by nature; his administration, following his lead, was often acute in their grasp of Cold War issues that had been around for a long time but was blindsided by the unexpected -- in Afghanistan, in the Gulf and again in the Balkans.

In this respect, Bush resembled the American foreign policy community as a whole. Perhaps this is one reason he has so many admirers there. I wouldn't make a comparison to Munich -- I mean, honestly. Is Munich really comparable to anything? -- but in the limitations of the first Bush administration can be found many of the problems later Presidents had to struggle with.

Please , please tell us. I love fairy tales.

On Americans and modern weaponry: "Americans designed and purchased weapons systems to fight the war they wanted to fight, not the war they were most likely to fight." (186)

Tom: Read that one again. I really like it. It sounds simple, but it is worth asking of every single expensive weapons program we fund.

Dave Hackworth addressed a lot of these issues in his weekly columns. Again, again and again. For free.

http://www.hackworth.com/archive.html

"DEFENDING AMERICA
David H. Hackworth
April 25, 1995

LEARN FROM THE PAST OR BLEED IN THE FUTURE

In the July 5, 1971 issue of Newsweek I said, "The North Vietnamese flag will fly over Saigon in 1975." Twenty years ago, as predicted, Saigon fell to Hanoi's assault troops.

I'm still often asked how I knew. My reply: I'd been there five years commanding U.S. infantry units and advising Vietnamese (ARVN) airborne, ranger and special forces. After three years of eyeballing the Vietnamese firsthand, I damn well knew that their "elite" units couldn't hack it and that ordinary ARVN grunts would cave-in when put to the test.

I felt like a doctor with his hand on a dying patient's pulse. There was no medicine, no transfusion, no magic pill that could have saved the corrupt South Vietnamese government and its equally corrupt and inept military.

Now Robert S. McNamara has brought back that sorry war with his confessions ("In Retrospect," Times Books, $27.50). A top Pentagon source who served in Vietnam and asked not to be named says, "If McNamara is so smart now, why was he so dumb then?"

Smart or dumb, future generations of Americans will hopefully benefit from his long AWOL memoirs. An honest examination of where our country went wrong in Vietnam has been desperately needed for too long. Perhaps McNamara's book will at last cause the Pentagon to take a hard look at why we failed in Vietnam, the first war America ever lost.

Retired Colonel Dennis Foley, who was an instructor at the Army Command and General Staff College in 1975, says that even before the fall of Saigon, "The 'V' word (Vietnam) was banned from Army service school training. The Army was back to the 'big battle war' on the plains of central Europe that it loved so well."

Defeat was too painful and too humiliating for the military bureaucrats to bear; they couldn't bring themselves to examine what they did wrong in order to avoid a recurrence. The hard lessons learned there were quickly swept under the rug in a mind-set of denial that prevented any serious post-mortem of the war.

In 1989, retired Lt. Gen. Henry "Hank" Emerson and I briefed the Pacific Command on our experiences fighting guerrillas. They seemed thunderstruck by the basic "two up, one back and feed 'em hot chow" squad leader material we gave them. Because the top brass and their planners had plum forgotten the hard lessons of Vietnam, we both felt as though we were reinventing the Vietnam wheel. I walked away shocked and scared to my bones.

An honest evaluation back in the mid-1970s could have prevented the errors of Somalia in 1993, mistakes which were identical to Vietnam almost 30 years before: a failure to recognize the limitations of firepower, technology and doctrine in fighting unconventional, highly motivated movements; a failure to understand the enemy; lousy command and control; poor intelligence; arrogance on the part of the war leaders from the White House to the Pentagon to the generals who ordered the undoable; a total ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the different clans; the reluctance of any of the policy makers and shakers to say this is mission impossible; and a failure to gain popular support on the home front.

The human cost: 45 dead and 175 wounded. The dollar cost: $2 billion. And then we cut and ran, just as we did in Vietnam!

Low intensity conflict is the future main event of warfare. As I write, hit-and-run operations, mines, booby traps and terrorist attacks are bubbling all over the world: Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union, south of the border and even in our heartland, Oklahoma City.

Perhaps now our leadership will have the horse sense to learn from the past. But it won't be easy to persuade our leaders to give up their big-battle and big-budget wars. Low intensity conflicts, if fought correctly, don't bring in heavy-duty dough for the defense industry, the porkers or the brass. You didn't see any stealth bombers over Somalia, Haiti or Oklahoma City.

It's too late to save those who died and suffered in Vietnam and Somalia because our brass didn't do it right. But as McNamara belatedly but wisely says, "It's not too late to prevent future generations from meeting the same fate."

Apparently few people listened.

If US gov't didn't think organized homicide was at odds with our democratic republic, why does so much official effort go into wartime propaganda, to sell and misrepresent every war since TR went to Cuba?

I don't mean to sound like the BD left wing. As a practical matter, avoiding undue talk of death and injuries has employed thousands in the current wars, using computers to expand and leverage skills honed by divisions of censors and film boards over the last century. The 'embed' tactic was intentionally and hugely successful.

Journaling was outright prohibited in Dad's WW2, every letter censored, luggage searched for notes, even after surrender. I've read war memoirs that had to be written and smuggled home in the margins of a mans Bible.

Think about that.

Our military has not been involved in national defense since the War of 1812. All since then have been covert business ventures that bled this nation of lives and wealth. I haven't read this book, but I suspect the author hasn't caught on to this obvious fact, otherwise none of the corporate publishers would print it.

The ignorance shocks me whenever I hear someone exclaim that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms. Our troops don't sacrifice over there, they are sacrificed. It is common to hear some brain-dead fool claim that war is good for the economy! Now back to this blog funded by the war racketeers to dupe Americans into thinking that greatness can be found by killing poor foreigners.

The latest Wikileaks release gives us an inside view of how US military officers ignored war crimes of all kinds. Our troops are being led by moral cowards, and in many cases war criminals. These documents have names of US officers that refused to investigate war crimes as well as covering up criminal actions by US forces.

We need an international war crimes tribunal convened ASAP. The House of War is crying foul. They are being seen for what they are, They classify information in order to cover up their filthy crimes of murder and torture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/opinion/23herbert.html?ref=bobherbert

I keep rolling Lewis's comment about limited war only existing at the operational and tactical levels over and again in my mind. I made a comment on here once to a young LT heading overseas that anger and frustration increase exponentially with the rate of incoming fire, and that they start very close to infinity at the first round. I don't know why, but it seems every troop I ever led had watched James Cameron's "Aliens" at some point in his life, and while Bill Paxton had the best lines in the movie, it seems they all remembered the one line by Michael Biehn.

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Now, I don't condone that, but many were the times when I sat in a patrol base or a morning update brief and wondered if the guys at the puzzle palace in Baghdad were aware that we were using real bullets. I never gave up on the concept of humanity and just war theory, but I did slowly become convinced that anyone working at a level higher than Division was trying to run the war as though it were a business. I was once told by a fellow Brigade staffer that I took my job too personally. I burst into something less articulate than Homeric verse and asked him how personally I should take it when it was his internal organs lying all over the road. It still bothers me that a guy can get blown to smithereens and we think there's no value in taking it personally.

Someone dies in combat. At Brigade level, he's a social security number and a status that gets tracked to Landstuhl. At Division, he's a storyboard. At Corps, he's a statistic. At Platoon and Company, he's a gaping wound in the soul of a hundred men. To his family, it's the end of the world. I remember watching McChrystal on 60 Minutes trying to convince a platoon who'd just lost a buddy that the ROE was the right way to go. McChrystal himself had to admit he wasn't sure he got the point across. I'm not sure the guys in that platoon didn't know better than him.

I think a socio-cultural look at path to and from Afghanistan will be a mirror we don't want to look at. We like to talk about all the flags and yellow ribbons we hung out right after 9/11, but we've forgotten all the YouTube videos set to Drowning Pool's "Bodies" as images demonstrate the destructive might of American warplanes and tanks. We forget all the publicly-created imagery of Bush, Powell and Cheney; their heads photoshopped onto the movie poster for "Tombstone" or collectively beating up Bin Laden. We bonded as a nation, but let's not kid ourselves-- the towers had come down and we were taking it personally. Today the media goes into a tizzy because a Hellfire from a single UAV kills a few bystanders. No one said anything about air missions in 2001. Folks, those weren't Hellfires being dropped from those B-52s.

I wonder if there was a poll taken of Americans back then of what military action we should take against Afghanistan. I'd wager more citizens advocated the use of nukes than military members. I can't prove it, but I'm certain the military used more restraint than the citizenry would have. I base that somewhat on Sherman's odyssey through the Civil War. There's a case to be made that we are more successful in war when the public is bloodthirsty. Ho Chi Minh must have believed that. He absolutely believed in its antithesis. That's how he won.

Our military leaders keep devising all these non-violent strategies to win hearts and minds and employing these counter-intuitive methods to conjure that good old Sun Tzu magic. It feels as though it's equal parts trying to prove how smart they are and appease an American public that grieves the death of Afghan and Iraqi civilians as much as its own service members. Collectively, it's a bag of half-measures.

Meanwhile, the enemy fights all-out. Ask the guys at Wanat how that plays out.

"We're too moral TO do ruthless..."

Tortue and murder in Iraq part and parcel of US military policy.

"To keep our honor clean"

"The documents appear to show that US commanders passed detainees over to the “Wolf Brigade”, a feared unit controlled by the ministry of the interior.

In files seen by The New York Times, a US interrogator told the prisoner that: “He would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees.”

In Samarra, 75 miles north of Baghdad, log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US soldiers, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for “further questioning”.

New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time, told The Guardian that "US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing," while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners.

Mr Maass interviewed the Wolf Brigade's American military adviser, Col James Steele, at the unit's improvised detention centre in Samarra, housed inside an old library.

The reporter claims that the 2005 interview was interupted by screams from a prisoner.

Wikileaks files released over the weekend showed that the US military gave a secret order not to investigate torture by Iraqi authorities."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/8084720/Wikileaks-Americans-handed-over-captives-to-Iraq-torture-squads.html

No one (yet) has pointed out the other key quality of American warfare: We want to kick ass, take names, then GO HOME.

George Washington consciously modeled his Revolutionary War behavior on the renowned Roman noble who returned to his farm after saving Rome with his generalship. The concept of the citizen-soldier is part of American cultural DNA. It's one reason why natural national pride and a little xenophobia gives us the idea that any man jack of us can pick up a rifle, climb in a cockpit and fight for freedom.

But the converse is, when the clock runs out and the game is over, we're done. We won the war, let's return to our honeys and our sports and our businesses. Does anyone know about the Wanna Go Home Riots of 1946? (I didn't until I read William Manchester's terrific old book, "The Glory and The Dream".) Thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen in both the ETO and PTO, sick of years of global war and depression, rioted against the quota-return system set up by the War Department. Their fathers had done much the same thing in 1919.

We answered our fighting citizens' desires and had The Bomb to boot, and thus there was no one to oppose the Red Army, whose units were NOT going home, or repel the first North Korean assault in 1950. The unsatisfactory result of the Korean War meant that US troops there have, in effect, never gone home; we won't be bushwhacked *that* way again.

We have lived with the results of our Go Home desire ever since. Whatever the point of the Iraq War was, during its prosecution much of our leadership's energies went into getting us out, just as it is now in Afghanistan. (I don't believe smart, sane people, looking at the situation, would want to prolong the affair, even at the risk of all the goals initially pursued. Helicopters on embassy rooftops.)

We have demonstrated political and cultural stamina before, but it doesn't come naturally to us as a people. There has always been, for us Americans, the promise of a new day and a place to do it; in a very crowded, hot-tempered world the promise and place will need enduring protection.