Comments on: Schmitt wrote well, distilling the best parts of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu into prose accessible to the Marines who would do the actual fighting

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 04:57:51 +0000

“Many of these officers — all aware that Lind had no actual military experience and that the Germans had lost both world wars — went on to become colonels and generals.”

That’s true. Those American colonels and generals were so right. The Germans had lost both world wars.

Barely…

While fighting on two fronts against adversaries cumulatively ten times their number…

By: Altitude Zero

Altitude Zero — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 20:18:46 +0000

I’ve always found the “Wehrmacht-worship” of many military analysts likr Lind simplistic, misleading and off-putting, but after tracking down the Lacey article in Small Wars Journal, he's at least as off base as Lind. Lacey's attitude seems to be "The US military is the bestest and coolest and baddest-assed fighting force in the world – Hoo-ah! Ignore the fact that we've won exactly one war in the last sixty-nine years, because…reasons" and this just won't cut it. The fact that the US military tends to win overwhelming tactical and operational victories, but ends up repeatedly getting beaten strategically by non-peer competitors would seem to indicate that something is surely wrong. It may be our top political leadership, it may be those who set strategic doctrine in the military, it may be that the US way of war trades long-term strategic value for short-term success, I don't know. But Lacey's argument that the medical team is great, but that the patient somehow usually ends up dead is even worse than Lind strutting around pretending to be Colonel Klink. At least Lind is trying to find out what is wrong, even if I do think he's barking up the wrong tree.

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 17:31:46 +0000

The USA is good with the stick, but not good with the carrot.

You can’t win a war only with kinetic action if the objective is to democratize Afghanistan, since that is not a kinetic objective.
You need ideology, propaganda, and education. You need to change the people of Afghanistan, if you want to change Afghanistan.

By: Goober

Goober — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 16:45:55 +0000

Hoyos;

Excellent. As a non-military man (4-f and then some), I always feel like I’m doing a Dunning Krueger when I speak on all matters military. However, in this one case, I feel like I’m pretty correct when I say that I agree with you.

The overriding failure of the US military since 1945 has been a failure to clearly articulate an achievable goal. And ultimately, without that, you cannot have a strategy. Without that, you get in-fighting amongst the higher ranks because nobody seems to know what they’re doing. MacArthur approaching the Yalu and then advocating for nukes is a perfect example of this – most politicians and a good portion of the military brass thought that pushing the NORKs back into NORKland was good enough, but nobody actually bothered to decide where to stop, so we just… kept going, with the result being a completely unintentional escalation of the war. This lead to a situation where US troops were in a very provacative position that we probably didn’t need to be in if we’d had a clearly articulated goal from day 1. Vietnam is another good example. I mean, need I say more? Vietnam is the poster child for “let’s go in and do something to accomplish something, we’ll figure out what, exactly, eventually”.

Then you get Iraq 1, which was, IMHO, a rare exception to this rule. Our goal was to put Saddam back into Iraq, so we did that and stopped. Goal achieved. You can quibble on whether that the was right goal or not, but at least we had an achievable goal and achieved it. You already covered A-stan and Iraq 2.

Ultimately, I again restate that I’m no military man, but just being the business man that I am, I can clearly see that no matter how professional, motivated, prepared, and well-equipped your team is, if you don’t actually know what you’re actually trying to accomplish, then amazingly enough, you’ll never actually accomplish anything.

By: Michael Towns

Michael Towns — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 20:32:47 +0000

“albeit I would expect some generals to know that and tell the truth”

Know it? Yes. Tell the truth? No. At the flag officer level, it’s rank politics all the way down. We haven’t had a “truth telling” general since Patton.

By: Hoyos

Hoyos — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 19:06:11 +0000

Part of the problem is really poorly defined or impossible goals for the military. When the goals are measurable, like “overthrow the Taliban”, we did that fast. When the goal was “turn Afghanistan into a modern democracy”, that is not something that would have been possible for anyone really. Restoring the Afghan monarchy and making it a more harmless or free place might have been possible. But we ideologically can’t.

The author of the Irrelevancy of Bill Lind was right that we have a tremendous record of tactical and operational victories. But again on the strategic level we don’t know what we’re doing but that is more policy, not really the military’s fault, albeit I would expect some generals to know that and tell the truth.