Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivers remarks during an awards ceremony for Newman's Own grant winners at the Hall of Heroes in the Pentagon, Sept. 24, 2014. DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel Hinton
Is It Time For General Dempsey To Resign? -- Col. Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret.), Best Defense/Foreign Policy
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knows that the Obama strategy for dealing with the self-proclaimed Islamic State is doomed to fail as currently structured; he has done as much to speculate in public that it will have to be altered. Without American combat troops on the ground to physically clear the cities and towns that the forces of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have occupied, we are in for a long and frustrating open-ended conflict that the American people will quickly tire of. Dempsey is too good a tactician not to know differently; having served with him briefly on a fact-finding tour for the deputy secretary of defense in Iraq in 2003, I found him to be one of the best commanders in the field. If he slaps his four stars on the table and tells the president to find somebody else to pitch the next inning, it will make a real difference.
In a telling study of the Vietnam War, H.R. McMaster, now an Army general officer himself, castigates the military general-officer class of that era for quietly carrying out orders that they knew to be wrong. In 2003, many generals strongly disagreed with President George W. Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, but none resigned in protest. How does this happen?
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My Comment: It is not going to happen .... especially at this moment in time with military operations currently underway (and escalating) in the Middle East.
Yes.
ReplyDeleteI've got a nice cartoon from the Cleveland paper about no boots on the ground, but no where to send it.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Churchill once say "War is too important to leave to the Generals"?
ReplyDeleteHindsight is always 20/20. But General McMaster IS right. The Joint Chiefs should have vocally protested how the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were conducted, especially in 2003-2004.
The Rumsfeld doctrine of using small numbers of US ground forces in conjunction with local militias worked in Afghanistan for a time, but the political decision to stay there for another 13+ years was an absolute disaster that any student of military history should have been screaming about from the highest mountain.
I won't even go into the absolute clusterfuck that Paul Bremmer allowed durign the immediate post-war period. THAT man should be prosecuted along with Rumsfeld for not only killing thousands, but basically bankrupting this country.
we should have had NO troops in either country past 2004. NONE.
McMaster knows it, Petreus knew it, etc.
Now, we are trying to contain the situation without being sucked into another quagmire. This is the Obama strategy, and the problem is that he's not articulating it properly. Who the hell cares what they do to each other over there as long as it doesn't spill out into Europe or the US? What we are doing now should be the absolute maximum we are willing to go.
Contain the infection and ensure it doesn't spread outside the region.