He openly championed the need for a revolution in military affairs. He created a new Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense to oversee the development of new military technologies and new ways of fighting. He signed a new defense strategy that directed the Pentagon to solve key operational problems that looked as if they had been lifted directly from Marshall’s 20XX wargame series — the focus not so much on the less-capable adversaries the United States had been contending with since 1991 but rather more so on emerging great powers with increasingly capable militaries. In other words, China.
But — in what ultimately proved unfortunate for the idea of a revolution in military affairs — that secretary’s name was Donald Rumsfeld, and nine months after taking office in 2001, America was attacked.
[…]
As in 1991, US forces operated from sanctuaries on the doorsteps of our opponents, who were powerless to stop us. We controlled the timing of when the wars were fought. We could operate with near impunity. We were technologically superior.
And the Taliban beat us. We lost, just as the Vietnamese beat us.
And, in fact, we are losing in Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Trying to trace back to root causes, and ignoring complex causality leads to simplistic, wrong theories of what went wrong. Which in turn leads to simplistic, wrong theories of what to do instead. Dysfunctional learning.
Maybe the world can’t be fixed, and we need to learn to coexist with evil. Or maybe coexisting with evil will buy us time for humanity to evolve into something less defective.
Because evil tends to destroy itself. Evil is stupid on a subtle level. Eventually Darwin comes to the rescue. We just have to outlast the evil.
The neocons will also have to die out. They don’t understand home court advantage or supply lines.
“The Democratic party does not have foreign enemies, it has foreigners who remind them of domestic enemies.”
— Reiboi.
In this vein, let us understand that if they are calculating then this foreign adventure will harm their domestic enemies with rising fuel and food costs, rising everything costs and continue to degrade the real economy where their domestic enemies draw their sustenance.
The Democratic party and the elites will be fine, come what may. Costs are to be borne by the commons as usual, the profits and power to the elites.
ROEs and lawyers will blunt technological and operational advantages every time. I’m firmly of the opinion that war should be swift with overwhelming force otherwise it will always be won by the little guy. If your theatre is asymmetric then take advantage of it. Brutal? Yes, but a short decisive conflict settles the matter.
Bob Sykes,
As i am so fond of saying, “who is ‘we’, kemosabe?”
In all those examples you list, the real war was Polygon vs Pentagon, and Polygon won every time.
Bob Sykes says”…We lost, just as the Vietnamese beat us…”
This is a complete lie. A total fabrication. There is no “we” in the loss of South Vietnam. In fact the Democratic Party deliberately allowed the North Vietnamese to take over the South. I repeat this frequently because people continuously keep the lie going that we were “always” doomed to lose in Vietnam. It’s part of the Left’s mantra playbook, so they won’t be, rightly, blamed for the whole debacle.
There’s some things you should know to put the war in Vietnam in perspective.
1. The Tet offensive where the oh so fierce, or so we were told, viet cong were supposed to take over the whole country was a big bust. The left hailed the VC as showing we could never win the war. Tet was a total, complete, massive disaster for the viet cong and the vast majority of them died. They were completely wiped out and ceased to exist as an organized force.
2. The US Army in Vietnam gets a totally undeserved rap that in no way responds to reality. They said they were going to shoot the living hell out of the commies until they were done with fighting and I say they almost did exactly that. They blew the living hell out of those commies. They completely destroyed the Viet Cong and almost, damn near almost, killed off the NVA.
3. From Pournelle,”And in Viet Nam the North sent 150,000 men south with as much armor as the Wehrmacht had in many WW II engagements. That was in 1973, and of that 150,000 fewer than 50,000 men and no armor returned to the North, at a cost of under 1,000 American casualties. Most would count that an outstanding victory. (Alas, in 1975 North Viet nam had another army of over 100,000 and sent it South; the Democratic Congress voted our South Vietnamese 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per man, but refused naval and air support; Saigon predictably became Ho Chi Minh city as we pushed helicopters off the decks of out carriers in our frantic evacuation; but that is hardly the fault of the US military).”
4. When the North attacked the South in 1975 their forces were strung out all along the limited highways north to south. If we had kept to our word about making sure they had air support and supplies, they would have been slaughtered. A serious blood bath. We could have bombed them from the air, bombed them from the sea, as we still had battleships off the coast to do so, and placed artillery on the mountains to blast them from all sides. Total annihilation. I think it was John Paul Vann who said he spent years looking for them in the jungle and now when they are out in open we’re doing nothing.
Now commies can make people fight by threatening them and their families but there’s a limit. A second blood bath destruction after the loss in 1973 might have either triggered full scale intransigence in the North or the North deciding not risk it again. As it was, the Democrats told Pres. Ford if he supplied air support they would impeach him and I think they would have.
The Democrat party said over and over, and still say, that we could never win in Vietnam and when they had the power to do so THEY made it happen. They are solely responsible for the debacle. The facts show unequivocally the North could not have conquered the South without cutting all support to the South. Just simple basic logic will tell you that the 1975 invasion would have failed with the South having US air support. Not even mentioning the rest.
5. The whole time the Vietnam War was going on insurgencies in all of Southeast Asia were, mostly, being defeated. The stated goals of the war were that if Vietnam fell it would embolden the commies in all Southeast Asia and they would all fall.
In fact fighting in Vietnam tied up the commies there and in a large part of Southeast Asia the commies were defeated. So we didn’t win it all but look at countries where the commies “won”, like Cambodia. I say that that while the Vietnam War was not a total win it did save many, many millions of lives in Asia.
While many Vietnam vets believe that they totally wasted their lives there, I do not believe that at all. I believe as messed up as it was what they did was noble and saved millions upon millions of others lives just exactly like what they were told they were there for. Many commie insurgencies were crushed while the war kept the commies occupied in Vietnam. How can anyone not believe this after looking at Cambodia, China, the USSR and all the cases where the commies won, I don’t know.
I’m looking forward the the future…when the Ukrainian resistance floods Europe with 2d hand Javelins and Stingers…or perhaps another Ambassador is killed buying them back [Benghazi] and officials are assassinated by the Ukrainian “Insider Threat” et al al…also looking forward past that when Russia’s best shock troops are Ukrainians, as the Chechens have become.
I love that Team GoofyUS is talking openly about making Ukraine into Syria et al et al…I’m sure the Poles are just overjoyed.
Someday it may dawn on our elites that when everyone either walks away or turns on you…maybe, just maybe it’s not everyone else.