I’m particularly curious as to the thoughts of the military and ex-military readers of my blog, particularly those who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. *points to
Basically his idea is that our military is great at kicking ass, but we’re bad at helping the other guy up, and taking him out for a drink afterwards (ie, rebuilding after the war, both political and physical infrastructure, the funny term for it is all me*). He proposes a separate military branch specifically for helping the other guy up and taking him out for a drink. And give that rebuilding group some real power, prestige and authority, because that group is easily as important as the guys with the guns. He also wants to develop the international political system to make it all go. That’s a brief and crappy summary of a much more sophisticated viewpoint, but do check out the video if the idea intrigues you.
* = Not the job of the Army Corps of Engineers? For some reason when I was younger I envisioned a special forces group that basically landed in the middle of nowhere behind enemy lines and tried to win over the locals through provision of aid. I thought those were the green barets. That’s neither here nor there, but it seems I was, uh, mostly in error on that one. =)
Imperial Hubris
Man, I don’t know if you have read Imperial Hubris by the CIA’s ex-Osama bin Ladin expert, but….
He mentions the fallout of this and military culture (it has sort of been done) which DOES cut operations into WAR and MOOTW (Moo-Twah) Military Operations Other Than War
The result is predictable. If you tell a roomful of uniformed John Wayne fans around a table and tell them to decide who and what does where, the “WAR!!!” team will get the first round draft picks and big money and the “NOT WAR!!!” team will get the puny vegan goth kids on the team and tanks made out of poo.
Now that Iraq has shown the smarter 95% of the human race that something went wrong, we will be faced with a deluge of people telling us that some organizational change is necessary – other than the obvious lesson – Unilateral Regime Change is a dumb choice. I can change my hat or shoulder patch and it is still a disastrously bad choice.
The same kind of analysis was done with the intelligence community. Tons of smartest-guy-in-the-room types came in and talked about organization change to prevent future mistakes and not enough of them addressed that the CIA did not have a singe well-positioned human asset within Iraq. Just informants with nicknames like “curveball”. I can change my department name and structure all day, but without an agent on the ground, I am just making stuff up.
You want to fix the Military? Have any government official in anyway connected to the Reagan/Bush Criminal Organization leave government service (and affiliated think tanks, lobbying firms, opinion journals, etc…) for the rest of their lives. None of their advisers, secretaries, propagandists, etc…. should ever have one iota of influence on any part of public policy ever again. In a couple of years the Army (along with lots of other institutions) would be doing fine.
Re: Imperial Hubris
A few points: No I haven’t read it, recommended?
I assumed the idea was to get congress to set it up so that the John Wayne fans don’t get to choose that the MOOTW crowd gets the crappy budget. I’d prefer adrenaline junkies work on projects more suited to their nature, and not on reconstruction efforts, so another issue is recruitment. Honestly, if not for the military saying homos suck, there’s a good chance I would have paid for college with ROTC, and seen afghanistan or iraq up close and personal myself. But if I could have joined the MOOTW force, I might very well have said ‘fuck it, I can stay in the closet’ when I was 18. (I was only vegetarian then, as I am now, but I have never been goth. 😉
So, if I’m getting what you’re saying, it’s “MOOTW is never going to be a priority. And we should never go it alone on offense.” Fair assessment?