Pushing

I thought that Mackubin Thomas Owens did a great job on the piece that Anthony references below -- and mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for not reading Anthony's comments in full yet, it's been one of those days. And I think Owens' points are well taken and exceedingly appropriate. I'd just argue that there is a difference between the uniformed military arguing whether or not to go to war and the uniformed military arguing over how to wage the war -- which doesn't necessarily contradict anything in the piece. Pushing back about waging war, bad, pushing back about how to wage war, perhaps not bad. Argue to the point of decision and then execute. I think there is an interesting convergence of political schadenfreude and mythmaking about how this is Rumsfeld's war and how if only we had listened to the Chief of Staff of the Army none of this would happen. As my friend Frank Hoffman has argued/is arguing at Carlisle Barracks yesterday/today, there was kind of a collective "look to the east on the morning of the 5th day" attitude about Phase IV in OIF whose responsibility extended beyond what did and did not happen in the halls of OSD.

Furthermore, I would argue that I find it slightly disheartening that The Soldier and the State is still a fixture of professional reading lists. No disrespect to Professor Huntington, and there is much of value in the book, but I still hold that the issue of extolling purist (purely military) over fusionist (socio-economic-politico-military) military advice is not helpful and, in fact, is very damaging when dealing with socio-politico-military environments such as Mindanao or Afghanistan or Iraq. I think that feeds into the pushing kinetic vice kinetic/non-kinetic solutions to problems on the ground. Of course, pushing for fusionist advice does not mean that military officers veto foreign policy, rather it just allows them to offer advice in hopefully a better context.

Compare and Contrast

For two different perspectives, compare this bit

A Media Intelligence Failure (subscription req)
Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2005, Pg. 10

We'll need time to dig through the details in the 600-plus-page Robb-Silberman report on intelligence that was released yesterday. But one important conclusion worth noting, even on a quick reading, is that the report blows apart the myth that intelligence provided by Iraqi politician and former exile Ahmed Chalabi suckered the U.S. into going to war.....

to this bit from General Jack Keane (USA ret), former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, in front of the House Armed Services Committee on July 15, 2004:

SKELTON: Well, why didn't it happen? Why was

KEANE: If I could comment on that.

SKELTON: Jack -- General.

KEANE: Well, let me add to that, because I participated in this process. And this represents the space, the intellectual capital that we expended to take the regime down. This represents the space for the intellectual capital to deal with it after. I mean, that was the reality of it.

And when I look back on it myself, and having participated and contributed to it, one of the things that happened to us -- and I'll just speak for myself. I don't want to speak for others, is many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be.

SKELTON: We're all going to be treated as liberators, right?

KEANE: That's correct. So, therefore, the intellectual capital to prepare ourselves properly for an insurgency was not there. Nor was -- there were very few people who actually envisioned, honestly, before the war, what we are dealing with now after the regime went down.