What I find most distressing is the near failure of most people to hold intellectually stable ideas - rather than adhering to the inflexible of either ideological extreme. I have recently decided that few people have character or honor, despite what they may believe concerning themselves. Most are wrapped up in their worlds, so addicted to what they have been brought up to believe, they cannot see. It is unfortunate. Unfortunate that someone recognizes the Emperor has no clothes, and due to the 'get along' mentality, most of the 'friends' cannot see, leaves few friends - in large part due to their lack of character, and what remains, are the few addicted to reading tripe such as the New York Times.
There have been a few times in my life I have thought - please, stop the merry-go-round, and let me off. For a few brief moments, I hoped. It is perhaps what exists in the back of our minds when it comes to extra terrestrials - that maybe someone/thing will come and take us away from all this. There are potential drawbacks - we become their food on some distant mother ship, but I suppose we could get around that by waiting for the return of some who tell of worlds of beauty far away without the New York Times and dishonorable people.
March 15, 2009
Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars
By THOM SHANKER
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.
For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.
To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.
A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama.
In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made it clear that the Pentagon was beginning to reconsider whether the old two-wars assumption “makes any sense in the 21st century” as a guide to planning, budgeting and weapons-buying.
The discussion is being prompted by a top-to-bottom strategy review that the Pentagon conducts every four years, as required by Congress and officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review. One question on the table for Pentagon planners is whether there is a way to reshape the armed forces to provide for more flexibility in tackling a wide range of conflicts.
Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with “a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct.”
“We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security,” Mr. Donnelly said. “The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa.”
But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. “If there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews,” he said, “it is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning.”
It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will “need to rebalance our strategy and our forces” in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.
Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist policy organization, said that senior Pentagon officials knew that the new review needed to more fully analyze what the rest of the government could bring to national security.
“We have Gates and others saying that other parts of the government are underresourced and that the DoD should not be called on to do everything” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “That’s a good starting point for this — to ask and at least begin answering where it might be better to have other parts of the government get stronger and do a bigger share, rather than the Department of Defense.”
Among the refinements to the two-wars strategy the Pentagon has incorporated in recent years is one known as “win-hold-win” — an assumption that if two wars broke out simultaneously, the more threatening conflict would get the bulk of American forces while the military would have to defend along a second front until reinforcements could arrive to finish the job.
Another formulation envisioned the United States defending its territory, deterring hostility in four critical areas of the world and then defeating two adversaries in major combat operations, but not at exactly the same time.
The Bush administration’s most recent strategy, completed four years ago, added requirements that the military be equipped to deal with a broad range of missions in addition to war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending American territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing terrorists and adversaries from obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
But Pentagon officials are now asking whether the current reality, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already outlasting World War II, really fits any of those models. “One of the things that stresses our force greatly is long-duration operations,” the senior Pentagon official said. “It’s the requirement to continue to rotate forces in over many, many rotations that really strains a lot of the force.”
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First, the first paragraph written by Shanker may well have an error in it, or Shanker is simply a wanker. For nearly six decades the United States had a military policy to be able to wage a world war on two different fronts in two different parts of the world simultaneously. That policy became formalized by US action against Germany and Japan in World War II, and was only reinforced in military policy after the war ended with the rise of the Soviet threat and communism from China and the USSR.
When the Wall fell, US policy shifted, and by Clinton's term, bases around the world were being closed, even within the US - closed. The army was shrunk, divisions disbanded, planes sent to the graveyard, ships scuttled or put in dry dock.
This policy was in place from 1992-93 until 2001, when Bush began rebuilding the military, often at odds with Democratic members of Congress.
Obama made it clear when he was campaigning that he would cut out unnecessary programs, and work with our allies. Working with allies means - NOT planning for war in two different areas at the same time, because we would depend upon our allies to assist us, when needed.
Shanker has no idea what he is talking about, except, he is espousing what is hoped for by the military - a larger better supported military. It will not happen, not under Obama.
War
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