IF ONLY THE TERRORISTS FOLLOWED THE RULES OF WARFARE

Again, our complaining retired generals:
To make the assertion that only six out of three or four thousand retired generals are pissing and moaning is a deceptive argument. Same can be said about the view that the six complainers represent only 1% of the total number of the retired. Everything should begin with the question I posed yesterday: How many of the 4,000 retired generals served in Iraq? How many sent their men down roads loaded with IEDs knowing they'd be killed or maimed for life with no grand objective in mind?

I mentioned yesterday that these guys are telling us something and we better listen. They could also be speaking for many still in the Army who are afraid to speak out because their careers would be ruined. Then there is something else.

These army generals have opposed "modernizing" the army from the get go. They want the "old" army. The old army that had big battle plans with huge numbers of troops and support designed to fight a similar foe.

How much of the bitching has to do with losing command and control of divisions of 25,000 plus troops. Now they have a hundred or so small groups of ten or twenty guys most which have to be directed by colonels and majors actually in battle. Generals want to general, which means planning and executing big battles, not some penny ante attack on a few buildings to kill two terrorists. Keep in mind that these guys were never trained for the type of warfare being waged today and they long for the "good old days" of set piece battles fought under theories a-la Clausewitz, a last century military theorist who had as mantra:

"Whoever has the most wins---unless superior technology is on the other side."

Hence we had Ike in Europe reacting too late to the German attack in the "Battle of the Bulge," a reaction that should have resulted in his being replaced; he didn't plan for the obvious. He then refused to let Patton cut off the Germans in the middle of the bulge. Instead, Ike, in true Clausewitz fashion, massed a numerically superior force in front of the German Panzers and waited for superior technology (airpower) to guarantee a Clausewitzian victory, just like he'd been taught at West Point.

We can mass more than a hundred times the troops any terrorist band can hope to muster; we have so much superior technology it is ridiculous, and more generals planning things than any hundred terrorist cells. This is a different war and the generals are trying to give us lessons based upon rules that no longer apply.

Do you really think that 200,000 more troops would make any difference, or would that number just mean we would be bigger slower moving targets? Poor planning from D.C. is as old as the army--try the planning for each of the hundred Pacific Islands we took during WWII with horrendous and needless loss of life; how about the planning for D-day, when troops were just landed under a cliff containing known gun emplacements and left there to win or die (they won and died); or the planning that missed the hedgerows that lay just beyond the Normandy beachhead that anybody who had ever visited France knew existed? All war plans in all of history were pretty awful, so what else is new other than we have a more than willing media eager to spread defeatism at every opportunity.

We are in a tough war, much tougher than any of us thought. The real question is: "Now what?"

Bitching former generals are interesting, but are they correct? This new army stuff all started when those goddam Greeks snuck soldiers into Troy inside that wooden horse. I mean that was totally unfair and nobody has allowed a wooden horse inside their cities since, no matter what some general thought.