Originally crossposted at a friend’s blog, Combat Cav Scout, who made it better with some editing.
When I was a Private in Infantry OSUT back in the dark ages of 1988, my Drill Sergeants had these pithy sayings that they would sling around, usually while smoking some troop, usually me, for some infraction or mistake. “Don’t assume, son. It makes an ass out of u and me!” The two that really stuck with me, and have actual application in the career of the Infantryman are “Piss poor prior planning prevents proper performance,” and “Failing to plan is planning to fail!” These two maxims are pretty useful in many situations, both in and out of the service, but in the military, the mistakes of failure to plan or to plan properly before a mission are almost always a prime ingredient in mission failure, with all that entails.
The most glaringly obvious example of this was the preparation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The entry into Iraq, routes through the country, the isolation and destruction in detail of Saddam Hussein’s military, and the logistical support necessary to accomplish this goal were planned in detail, down to the minute that individual units were to cross the Line of Departure. But there was no planning for the aftermath. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously banned Pentagon and CENTCOM planners from planning for the days and weeks after the invasion, or even asking questions about it, under the threat of relief. His idea, if one can call it that, was that the whole thing would be over in a few months with a pre-fabricated pro-western government installed in Baghdad and the troops home in time for Thanksgiving dinner. We ended up fighting multiple factions over more than a decade and losing almost 4,500 KIA and over 32,000 WIA, with Iraqi casualties estimated around 100K to 300K killed.
This brings me to our current situation in the Middle East. With Syria engaged in a multi-way civil war, and Dictator Bashar Al Assad engaged against “moderate” Sunnis and an organization variously called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or simply, Islamic State (IS.) We want to see Assad go away, but his strongest adversary is IS. The “moderates” are the weakest and least organized of these factions. They are fighting Assad’s government and IS, who is fighting them and Assad, who is fighting pretty much everybody who isn’t a member of Assad’s Alawhite sect. IS is every bit as brutal and heinous as Assad if not more so, and they aren’t our friends either.
IS, having brutally murdered two American Journalists and posting the graphic imagery of these beheadings on social media, seems to be itching for a fight with the West, and the US in particular. Recently, media pundits and politicians have been clamoring for the US to take a more active role in attacking IS, and demanding that the President do something. The question I’d like to see the television pundits and politicians ask, and they never ask, by the way is this: “There are any number of things we CAN do, but is this something we OUGHT TO do?” The answer just might be “no.”
What bothers the shit out of me, as a former Infantry NCO who’s lead squads and platoons in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent a couple of sentences in Battalion and Brigade S-3 (Plans, Operations, and Training, for those who don’t know) shops, is this demand to do something, as if our simply dropping bombs will suddenly make things better. The people who clamor most loudly for this are, in many cases the same people who led cheers from the sidelines for the aforementioned Iraq disaster. These are frequently people who have little to no experience planning or leading combat operations of any sort and very few of whom had any skin in the game then and don’t have any now.
Successful armies plan the things they do, whether it’s conducting squad PT or invading a sovereign nation. Very successful armies constantly update those plans whenever the relevant factors change. I don’t know what, if anything, the Pentagon is planning for IS. I know that they’re planning something. The President may not have any specific intent at this time, but the J-3’s primary mission is to provide him with options should he choose to do something.
One of the biggest problems dealing with the Syrian situation is this: if we do something that hurts IS, that thing will most likely accrue positive benefits to Assad, and vice-versa. This is one case where the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. If we choose to elevate the “moderates” in the Syrian resistance (assuming that such people actually exist,) that will make things better for Assad or IS, depending on whichever of them is positioned to take advantage of the fact, at least for a short period, because they’re all fighting each other.
One of the most important questions to ask when planning an operation is “what happens next?” We can make some assumptions about what the enemy or the local population will do, based on historical precedent, but that is of relatively limited usefulness. We have to begin with the end-state in mind. What do we want the situation to look like when the last US troop is back safely at home drinking beer and playing with the kids? That’s the Strategic level of planning, and it’s damned hard to do. The enemy has a way of doing what he wants to achieve his goals regardless of what you want him to do. At the Operational level, the planning is generally aimed at creating the environment for the Strategic plans to come to fruition. It’s a smaller scale, generally with a shorter timeframe, with multiple contingency plans based on the enemy’s most likely course of action and the enemy’s most dangerous course of action. This is the domain of Theater headquarters, Corps, Divisions, and to some extent, Brigade-level mission planning. From Brigade level and below, the planning is at the Tactical level, down through Battalions and Squadrons to Companies, Troops, and Batteries, to the Platoon and finally to the Squad and Section. This is where the rubber meets the road.
At every level, planning begins with the Commander’s Intent—what does the higher Commander’s Desired End-State look like? We use the acronym MET-TC to determine what we are going to try to do and how we are going to try to do it. Mission, Enemy, Terrain and weather, Troops and support available, Time available, Civil considerations describe generallythe planning considerations to take into account before the first Soldier hits the Line of Departure. And this planning has to take place at every level from the Pentagon J-3 working from the President’s intent down to the Infantry Platoon and Squads out in the middle of bad-guy country. At each level, the timeframe, area of operations, and scope of action are shrunk down to levels that are theoretically achievable by the unit responsible.
While plans at the Strategic and Operational level are frequently thought up and drafted by people with advanced degrees and decades of experience, with access to all sorts of high-tech information systems and the latest intelligence in air-conditioned facilities with nice amenities, the guys and gals who attempt to make those plans a reality are usually High School graduates and recent College graduates, in many cases doing this for the first time in the real world, and they’re running on bad food, little sleep, too much caffeine and adrenaline, using equipment that’s often unsuitable and in varying states of disrepair, and possessing very little knowledge of the outside world and their part in it. Things can go sideways very quickly at the tactical level with repercussions all the way up to the White House. All of the previous paragraphs should have led you to the realization that this shit is hard to do.
Liberty60
Terrific post- I’ve heard it said that one thing Obama frequently asks his briefers is “So then what happens?”
You hit the nail on the head, no one in The Village ever bothers to ask that question. We are going to spill blood/ blow something up, there is no doubt about that. Domestic politics demands it. It would just be nice if for once we didn’t let that be the entirety of our strategic outlook.
bemused
Hmm, I’d say “Failing to plan is planning to fail” is the entire Republican platform.
geg6
You would certainly know more about this than me, but I’m glad to see we see this situation the same way.
The wingnuts don’t sound one iota different than they did in 2002-03. And I was right then, too. Let’s hope the rest of America has learned the lesson.
Villago Delenda Est
I give you the monster charlie foxtrot that was the deserting coward’s great Mesopotamian adventure.
Shinseki told them it was going to be a charlie foxtrot, and the stupid ass motherfuckers fired him and did it anyways.
von Rumsfailed specifically ordered the professionals subordinate to him NOT TO DO WHAT THEY WERE TRAINED TO DO because it got in the way of Neocon idiology.
Hunter Gathers
White people don’t do nuance.
We don’t respond well to rational, thought out arguments.
We want action, and we want it now, now, now.
We don’t know what, exactly, that we want Obama to do, but he needs to do whatever it is that he’s going to do now, now, now.
Since he refuses to something right the fuck now, I’ve been hearing from my fellow Crackers about how they miss W. He may have been a fuck up, but at least he acted when the White majority demanded it.
Don’t Do Stupid Shit is incompatible with the demands of the American electorate in this foul year of our lord, 2014.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hunter Gathers: Not all white people are that fucking stupid.
Admittedly, though, many of them are.
rikyrah
Serena gets another $1 million in bonus prize money.
$ 4 million in checks tonight!!
Martina and Chris are there to welcome Serena to the 18 Grand Slam Club!
Ruckus
Very well stated.
Always the first question in any endeavor is “Should we do this?” Followed immediately by, How? and What If?
The higher the possible cost in human life, the more important these questions are.
As many/most of our conservatives and especially the neocons value lives other than their own at zero, it is very easy to see why they never do any questioning, especially of their dogma.
Sandia Blanca
Great post! I am profoundly ignorant about these matters, and will freely admit it. Would that our pundits could do the same, or let People Who Know, like soonergrunt, tell us how hard these things really are.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Took the words out of my mouth.
Villago Delenda Est
“War is very simple, but in War the simplest things become very difficult.”
Carl von Clausewitz
This shit is not new, nor is it unknown. However, when you have a fucking legion of dilettantes making the calls, well, expect poor results.
trollhattan
Word. Okay, words. Great post.
The same shitheels who decried Obama for “not listening to his generals” are now excoriating him for listening to his generals.
How are we to “fight” these IS assholes and their associates, and exactly where? Am sure the Republicans would be right there behind our fighting folks, offering to hold their glasses.
geg6
@Villago Delenda Est:
Especially south of the Mason-Dixon Line and all along the Appalachian Trail.
gnomedad
If this isn’t treasonous malfeasance, I don’t know what is. Just maddening to think that these people were running the country.
Great post.
Villago Delenda Est
I learned nearly all this shit in ROTC before I raised my right hand and became a butterbar.
Fuck, it drives me fuckin’ crazy. McCain should KNOW this shit, he’s a fucking Naval Academy grad, albeit in competition to come in last in the class.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
How hard do you think McNuggets had to work to come in nearly dead last? I’m thinking it was pretty natural for him.
MattF
Yeah, well. ISIS are terrrrrists an’ we gotta kill them terrrrrrists. An’ those movies they make are terrrrrrist movies an’ we can’t ignore them because it would be ignoring terrrrrrists an’ we can’t do that.
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: hahahahaha
elm
But I thought bombing them was a surefire and permanent solution. After all, the past two decades of bombing Iraq seem to have worked out well.
Maybe we should try the other option (military coup to install a nominally-friendly dictator).
eemom
Pundit, Rude, concurring
WaterGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: John McCain was essentially Luke Russert. Think about that.
Ruckus
@MattF:
Very realistic neocon voice.
You were imitating weren’t you? Just forgot the /neocon tag?
stibbert
Great post, SG.
Seems to me that the USA! war-party just automatically assumes that every military problem is already targeted by drone laser-sights & NRO GPS locations, & that all our troubles would be blown away (b/c high-tech!) if only we had a guy in the White House w/ enough stones to push the button.
I blame Tom Clancy.
MattF
@Ruckus: Yeah, I leave out the tags– but probably shouldn’t.
Bobby Thomson
Also, too, proper prior preparation prevents piss poor performance.
srv
Well, clearly Obama’s planning for post-Iraq and letting Erdogan, leader of NATO member, fuck with Assad (whether you’re a Bob who believes we’re pulling the strings or not) would end well.
Last months Frontline is pretty brutal on the Bush and Obama regimes for their failures to plan. Obama wanted out, so then what? Blame Maliki for everything? Hope that works out for you.
Assad is the only good guy in Syria who makes any difference. Time to make life difficult for Ergodan or learn to live with ISIL/ISIS and get blamed for it.
MattF
@efgoldman: I was hoping that the ‘logic’ would be a giveaway.
rikyrah
A safer Detroit means big fines and racial profiling for black residents
Detroit’s gentrified makeover means more policing of nuisance crimes – but the fines fall disproportionately on black residents
Rose Hackman
theguardian.com, Sunday 7 September 2014 12.00 EDT
What’s the cost of more police crackdowns in Detroit for “quality of life” issues?
For Xavier Johnson, a young black businessman in the city, it’s $1,500 in fines that he can’t afford.
Call it the price of gentrification. Johnson, a rising star in Detroit’s startup community, is one of many residents paying the price for an aggressive style of policing that has overtaken the city as it cleans up its reputation. Current Detroit residents – mostly African-American – face an added cost of living as the city police pile on nuisance fines to crack down on smaller crimes. The effect is to make the city more appealing to successful, and mostly white, middle class professionals – while burdening the city’s poorest with more bills to pay.
The hotly contested police strategy is called “broken windows”, and Detroit police chief James “Hollywood” Craig has embraced it with fervour. The theory – popularised by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police chief William Bratton in the 1990s – means cracking down on smaller nuisance crimes in order to prevent those larger, more violent ones. Think of the crackdown on “squeegee men” who forcibly cleaned drivers’ windows for tips.
The deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown this summer at the hands of police officers in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, are also examples of broken windows policing, spun out of control. While Eric Garner was placed in a fatal chokehold after being stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes, current information shows Michael Brown stopped just moments before he was shot for walking in the middle of the road, or jaywalking: both “quality of life” offences.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/07/safer-detroit-fines-racial-profiling-black-residents
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
It isn’t correct so it could go either way.
raven
And while we are at it
Overblown claims of deaths and waiting times at the VA
Ruckus
@MattF:
I know but always like asking rhetorical questions.
D58826
Calgary Cruz is demanding Obama ask Congress for permission to move in on ISIS and have a concerted overwhelming plan to take them out but should confine our activities to Iraq and not chose sides in Syria. He doesn’t explain what ‘take them out’ involves. He also seems to be granting ISIS a sanitary in Syria.
Since airpower is unlikely to ‘take them out’ is this fool talking about ground troops? If so exactly where will they be based. ISIS is located in a landlocked portion or the Syrian/Iraqi desert and I doubt that any of the surrounding Muslim countries are going to want another western Christian army on their soil.
None of these fools seems to see beyond the end of an m-16 or an f-15. Obama is correct when he says it will take a political/religious solution. It will also take time, a lot of it as many of the driving forces in the conflict are centuries old. The Sunni/Shia split is 1500 years old. In the end the only people who can begin to solve this problem are the local, mostly Muslim, populations. Even if Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim, he does not have a magic wand to make this go away. At best we can make an impact on the margins. Unless the problems within these societies are resolved by the people living in them, then the destruction of ISIS will simply plant the seeds for the next and even more violent (if that is possible) terrorist group.
Mustang Bobby
Thanks for this. I’ve been hoping someone with the real experience would put it into words, and you did.
MattF
@D58826: Good old Ted. He usually has a good grasp of winger thought processes, but I wonder if that’s true this time. Wingers aren’t known for their courage, and going after ISIS would take some fortitude.
JDM
If the invasion of Iraq was planned so intricately, why did we not have supplies for our soldiers, and why did we not guard the high explosives that the IAEA told us were there, leading to them being looted? Face it, the invasion was as well planned as the aftermath, which is to say hardly at all.
Cervantes
@Soonergrunt:
Well, you know, they weren’t killing us on YouTube, and then in our wisdom we started to bomb and strafe their locations, and then they killed two of us as a deterrent. That’s not exactly “itching for a fight with [us],” is it? Maybe you see the sequence of events differently?
Mike J
When this was pointed out to the Bushies at the time, they always responded with “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” which may be a cliché, but is also complete and utter horseshit.
WaterGirl
@Cervantes: You don’t see the beheadings, on video no less, as intended to provoke the United States? I do.
MattF
@WaterGirl: I see it as a typical terror tactic. They want fear and then panic. As do the neocons.
Mike J
@WaterGirl:
Luke Russert isn’t a Vietnamese ace. If Luke Russert has brought down even one American plane I’ll eat my hat.
D58826
@Liberty60: Just once I would like to see one of the Sunday hosts actually cross examine one of the neocons. Ground troop’s – yes or no. How many? where will they be based? How will the war be paid for? Who exactly are we fighting? the Sunni’s or the Shia? or both.
Make these clowns answer some detailed questions that are not part of their talking points. I rather suspect the first time it happens the guest will have smoke coming out of his/her (but mostly he) ears and he will not appear on that show ever again.
Ruckus
@JDM:
No military plan can be perfect. Some things will be missed, it’s the nature of going into a hostile situation. You can’t know everything, all the problems and opposition you will face. And in this case they weren’t allowed to plan in a normal military fashion so the risks and the problems were far larger than they should have been. This was a total failure of their civilian leaders to understand the risks and costs, both of lives and money, of doing something so mind bogglingly stupid.
raven
@Mike J: Mc Cain is not Vietnamese and he damn sure isn’t an Ace.
Cervantes
@WaterGirl:
Yes, if only we hadn’t dropped bombs on them, they’d have had no reason to react so … provocatively.
D58826
@Mike J: Actually I think McCain crashed 4 American planes in his career. Does that count?
Ruckus
@Mike J:
This.
Cervantes
@raven: I’m guessing it was a joke: that is to say, McCain was, in effect, fighting for the Vietnamese.
Violet
I am so glad Barack Obama is President right now. He understands complexities and nuances and he’s not afraid to act when necessary. He’s the adult in the room.
Mike in NC
@Villago Delenda Est:
Like Dubya at Yale and Harvard, he barely bothered to show up for classes or crack a book, knowing his family connections would save his sorry ass.
Violet
@Cervantes: And also that John McCain was a “legacy admission” just like Luke Russert was a legacy/pity hire.
Bobby Thomson
@srv:
Well, yeah. That or not give a shit, which also works for me.
Mike in NC
There’s a new documentary on Rumsfeld streaming on Netflix. Haven’t worked up the stomach yet to watch it. I was at USJFCOM during 2003-2005, and the work of hundreds of professionals was ignored for political reasons.
rikyrah
This guy shutdown the police
Never Open the Door for the cops, but if you do, never consent to warrantless searches
http://youtu.be/CZh9xumD1cQ
Violet
@Mike in NC:
Sounds like most corporations.
Cervantes
@Violet: Actually, I would guess young Luke is performing pretty much as his employers intend. They did not settle for him — he’s pretty much what they were looking for.
Ruckus
@Cervantes:
I think less a joke and more a commentary that McCain is such a chucklehead that he effectively was playing for the wrong side. I’m betting that raven is not going along with this because others lost planes and equipment as well and chuckles did spend some time as a guest in the worst hotel in the world. I know a gentleman who was a radar operator/weapons officer in the navy who was hit by missiles three times, having to ditch twice. He resigned after the third time, he just couldn’t do it anymore. Even I give McChuckles a bit of a break for his time in country, and someone had to be last in his class and it wasn’t him.
Cacti
During the President’s first appearance on the new and improved Press the Meat with Chuck Toad, CT goes all Mitt Romney and says “You’ve not yet said the word Syria in our conversation”.
Official transcript shows 4 separate mentions of Syria prior to Chuck’s factually inaccurate observation, including the response immediately preceding it.
New and improved right wing propaganda show still a right wing propaganda show.
Violet
@Cervantes: Sure, he’s competent enough at being what they want him to be. If his dad wasn’t Tim Russert would he have even gotten an interview for the job? Doubt it.
Cacti
Fun fact:
In 2014, lightning strikes have killed 10 times as many Americans as ISIS (20 vs. 2).
Per the National Weather Service.
Cacti
@Bobby Thomson:
I guess srv could blame underpants gnomes for Maliki shutting the Sunni out of the post-Saddam government and positioning Iraq as a puppet of Tehran.
WaterGirl
@Mike J: I was thinking McCain is Luke Russert int he sense that he didn’t get where he is on merit, he got there because of who his daddy was. And granddaddy. And that one can’t really assume McCain would know something that the average service person would.
trollhattan
@Cacti:
G.W.L.: The Global War on Lightning.
trollhattan
This seems ghoulish to me.
How about a
fingertoe? I can get them afingertoe.srv
@Cacti: I guess Maliki should have allied with underpants gnomes after we abandoned him to his fate.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/what-we-left-behind
chopper
@Mike J:
Perfect.
Cacti
@srv:
I blame Obama for Maliki’s police state, bully boy tactics against a third of the national population of Iraq.
Also, my toast got burned this morning.
Thanks Obama!
srv
@Cacti: Oh, you seemed to have missed something…
Can you see it?
There’s quite a bit more there there, but I get it – Obama cannot fail, he can only be failed.
Next up, you’ll bring up the SOFA. The SOFA Obama demanded Maliki and his cabinet get the Iraqi Parliament approve, but didn’t require the US Congress to approve…
Of course, we know, it’s always different if Obama does it.
Mike G
@Violet:
Who needs knowledge or experience when you’ve got AUTHORITAH!
The mantra of the Bush Assministration, the South, and every stupid, arrogant American corporation.
NotMax
Justice and revenge are not synonymous, though the hawktocracy campaigns long and hard for them to be so.
NotMax
Oh, BTW:
Alawite.
WaterGirl
@Cervantes: Huh. I think they are trying to goad us into all out war again in Iraq, which would be even worse than the way things stand now. Your mileage obviously varies.
El Caganer
@NotMax: I think Allwhite sects are more common in America than in Syria.
Cacti
@srv:
Nope, I got it.
Obama didn’t resolve 1,300 year old internecine ethnic and religious squabbles that date back to the death to the death of Muhammad, just like he promised to do.
Oh wait, he never promised that at all.
But if we’d just left a praetorian guard of US forces behind to backstop the Bush installed Maliki government, the Shia and Sunni surely would have started loving each other, because America is exceptional.
And just because Maliki’s own armed forces weren’t willing to die for him once the blowback from his heavy-handed governance started, doesn’t mean US forces shouldn’t be ready to play bullet stoppers for him!
Damn you, Obama!
Pogonip
@Violet: Yes, and the biggest problem is you cannot defeat Isis without the help of the local yokels, who may be reluctant to do so if they are aware that the U.S. government has, at least as far back as the Montagnards, a habit of abandoning its collaborators once it pulls out of a theater. Obama leaves office in 2017; he’s not going to be able to repair 50 years of broken trust in that time. I’d rather see the regional governments go in.
Pogonip
@trollhattan: In Vietnam soldiers were collecting ears (and, I suspect, other extremities). That’s war. It brings out the worst in people.
Sir Nose'D
Will there be another post on BJ this good for the rest of September? The gauntlet has been thrown down, front pagers!
Tehanu
@trollhattan:
It is ghoulish. God knows I’m not sorry bin Laden is dead or that we killed him, although it would have been better to take him alive and try him for mass murder. I wasn’t there in the room and maybe the Seal who shot him had no real choice, so I won’t second-guess. But taking souvenirs and putting them in a memorial to his victims … ugh. It was a tragic necessity to find him and take him out, not something to be celebrated.
Chris
@Cacti:
Unlike apparently all the DC punditocracy, the sight of the entire Iraqi Army folding like a cheap lawn chair when ISIL started their thing is what finished convincing me that we’d done the right thing by pulling out of Iraq.
Staying in would’ve meant being stuck indefinitely propping up an empty shell with no long-term viability of its own. This wasn’t a case of protecting a weaker country against a stronger neighbor – the rebels against Maliki came from his own people, as did the army that wouldn’t fight for him. Why the hell is it a good idea for us to be the only people supporting a guy like that? If we stayed as Maliki’s Praetorian Guard, exactly how many of his own people were we going to be called upon to fight on his behalf? How long, exactly, were we going to have to carry on the role of doing all the things the Iraqi state couldn’t do for itself because the Iraqis didn’t actually like the Iraqi state very much?
Chris
@stibbert:
Probably a symptom more than a cause, but one that encapsulates the mindset pretty well.
I’ve heard the post-WW2 American foreign policy establishment divided into three big generation, each of whose members shared a common background. Immediately after the war, it was the “Wise Men” (common background: Wall Street bankers or lawyers). In the sixties, it was the “Best and Brightest” (common background: Harvard intellectuals). In the eighties (and carrying all the way into the George W. Bush administration), it was the “Vulcans”* (common background: Pentagon bureaucrats, whether military or civilian).
I have no particular love for businessmen or academics, but it doesn’t seem like an accident that ever since the “Vulcans,” e.g. the Pentagon generation, took over, there doesn’t seem to be a single foreign policy debate anymore that isn’t summarized in terms of “who do we bomb? Why aren’t we bombing? Is bombing enough or should we send in the Marines as well?” The foreign policy apparatus has become completely military-centric, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
(* not a Star Trek reference).
JR in WV
@raven:
Yes, but… you are completely missing the point of the comment on McCain’s abjectly sad military career.
I bet McCain dropped more American combat planes off the radar than any other Vietnamese combat warrior. Can we count the fighter he was in when the Forrestal caught fire? His first move in that crisis was to drop his ordinance load into a pool of burning jet fuel, then he ran away, not pausing to take command of firefighters on the burning aviation deck.
I think McCain did more good for the North Vietnamese than anyone short of the top generals in charge of prosecuting the war against the South Vietnamese and the US Military, successfully. His posturing since leaving the USN is insane, given the reality of his failed military career.
If he wasn’t the son and grandson of senior successful Admirals he would have probably been expelled from Annapolis, and if he had successfully gotten his nose on the grindstone to pass and become a commissioned officer, he would have been allowed to resign after crashing the 3rd plane. You don’t get an unlimited number of multi-million jets to fuck up, even in a war. Especially in a war!
When he was shot down and captured by the NVA he was not following the orders for the mission he was supposed to be flying, so his shoot-down/captured adventure was all his fault. A more sad example of a non-effective commissioned officer we have not seen in modern times except for the deserting coward, Shrub Bush.
Soonergrunt, I’m very glad to see another excellent report from you on current Middle-Eastern military/political affairs. I miss your contributions to this blog when you aren’t regularly represented on the front page.
Hope all is well with your family,
Sincerely,
JR in WV
Chris
@JR in WV:
Is Zaid still on as a front pager? (Not that I don’t love Soonergrunt’s contributions, just wondering since I believe his last contribution was in July).
Cervantes
@Chris:
Who is “us”? Bush (or rather, Cheney) put Maliki in place because he seemed sufficiently naive and pliable; and then, when it was clear Maliki was in over his head, Bush (actually Bush this time) sustained him in power because he liked him personally. By the time Obama took over, Maliki had consolidated power on behalf of the Shia and here we are.
rea
@WaterGirl: John McCain was essentially Luke Russert.
Except that McCain’s father and grandfather were a hell of a lot more competent than Tim Russert
Cervantes
@rea: Tim Russert could wait for the telephone to ring better than any other journalist.
Unsympathetic
Two items that have appeared precisely nowhere:
1) Al Qaeda wanted to attack overseas. ISIS doesn’t [didn’t] actually care at all about the US.
In fact the ISIS army, such as it is, consists precisely of disaffected elements of Saddam’s Sunni army leaders which the US left without a job when they disbanded the Iraq armed forces. And, ISIS is focused exclusively on toppling local governments.. there have been jihadi groups in the ME consistently since the 60s.
2) The OIG report on the VA dismissal of Shinseki revealed that, once again, Shinseki was railroaded based on trumped-up lies by people who don’t want to confront the reality he stood for. Not shockingly, zero Republican politicians admitted they should be objective.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/09/02/overblown-claims-of-deaths-and-waiting-times-at-the-va/
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
What’s really frustrating is that the entire DC press corps falls in line on the “do something” front. This morning on NPR was the first time in MONTHS that Cokie Roberts took a break from her constant refrain of how everything is bad news for the President. For once she was non-critical, because he’s about to announce that he’s decided to “do something” about IS.
Cervantes
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
The DC press corps never fails to impress.
Itself.
Cervantes
@Unsympathetic:
Just a quick comment re a passage in the article you cited:
That’s five caveats in twenty-one words.
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So the Republicans want Obama to put his plan before congress so they can what,.. not vote on it last time with Syria?
smedley the uncertain
Thread is probably dead but I still want to give Soonergrunt plaudits for his post.
An accurate reminder for an old DOD retiree of how planning should work.
” planning is what you do to gain time to recover when plans fall apart.”
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@srv: LOL It was your hero GW who gave Iraq to the Shi’its. People were mocking Bush for setting that up before the Iraq war. Heck that was one of Powell’s arguments against overthrowing Saddam in the first Iraq War was it would just give Iraq to Iran.
sharl
@Chris: Sorry to be so late to what is likely a dead thread now. The Vulcans were a rather specific group of war hawks who advised Dubya. A more accurate statement would be that they took over the machinery of the Pentagon (and the State Dept. for that matter), rather than them being DOD bureaucrats.
There were people inside of DOD who found that takeover process quite horrifying, and who would leak to folks like retired Army COL David Hackworth.
–continued–>
sharl
@sharl: (cont’d) One of those insiders who was well placed to watch this whole awful thing go down inside the Pentagon was USAF LCOL Karen Kwiatkowski. Most of her more recent writing is now archived at the site of the odious Lew Rockwell; yep, she’s a libertarian (I was initially surprised at how many ex-government and military people go that way, but having seen how those institutions can wear down and render jaded those who work for them, I’m not so surprised any more).
No link to Rockwell’s site from me, but here’s a link to the third and final part of her series in The American Conservative, on how the bureaucratic machinery of the Pentagon was coopted from within – all quite legal, since Bush did win the election, 5-4. Links to parts 1 and 2 are at the bottom of that final (third) part.
reality-based
@Villago Delenda Est:
and, FWIW, McCain is an amazingly shitty pilot – if daddy hadn’t been an admiral, no way the Navy lets him fly jets after he loses three airplanes!
Matt
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”