Comments
MacGregor will me marginalized like Bacevich. It's not cool or Profitable to speak of Limitations.
Heed his words, when Philadelphia is cutting back on fire houses and we are spending billions in Afghanistan, someone, somewhere will speak up.
The once beautiful Terri Hatcher hit the wall, she is now half the woman she used to be. Our Adventures in the muslim world have hit the wall as well. You guys have had 10 years to invade, conjure, build, paint, plumb, and make friends. Where has it gotten us?
No where.
Time to face facts, The US Army has not won anything since 1945.
The "Bush Mantra" (not really a "doctrine")was that it is better to fight them overseas than it is at home. Aggressive, but reasonable; probably not particularly suitable, acceptable, or feasible though. MacGregor apparently wants to fall back to the last defensive position and fire the final protective fires. This, while much less aggressive, also fails on all counts of COA analysis.
If those are my two choices, I choose the first one. Better to go down swinging than curled up in a fetal position. But these are not are only two options.
A more reasonable approach is to finally be honest with ourselves as to the role that our own foreign policies have in stirring up the motivations of dissatisfied populaces around the world in a fashion that leaves them to reasonably conclude that attacking the U.S. is a path to a better future. Make adjustments in our Ways and Means for pursuing our Ends; and then find a new balance point of foreign mitigation (primarily law enforcement, not war) of such threats. Couple this with making reasonable adjustments in our border security, immigration, and integration policies and practices as well.
Bottom line is that we do need to change. We can not force everyone else to change to accomodate us, nor can we hide behind our walls either. We are a maritime, commerce-based nation, as as such we must engage the world. Backing DOD off from Cold War containment missions and refocusing on securing sea lanes trading access would be a good start. So would getting DOS to expand their capacity to one designed to deal with non-state entities (both landed and unlanded) as well.
Bob
Robert:
Macgegor has no problem going after and killing the enemies of the United States in the world's troubled spots or anywhere else for that matter, but he is saying that neo-imperialism--aka American nation building-- and often metaphorized with terms like "inter agency approach" and "whole of government" is not the way to do it and is a waste of precious resources.
I think he would agree mostly with your last two paragraphs.
thanks
gian
Agree for the most part with Robert's last two paragraphs, and also with TJM that the "report" was more of a snarky tirade than any value-added argument.
There are some very good ideas out there for ways to adjust our approach to the region, some of which have been published on SWJ. A recent example would be Lawrence Sellin's article "Is Our Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Approach Irrelevant?" There are some very good points made there, things worth considering. Too bad it only touched on those concepts and did not delve much into them. All other attempts at criticism have been truly disappointing.
We have not seen many really good criticisms of either COIN or the apparent national strategy in the region. COL Macgregor's article is an extreme example of a total lack of value added to the conversation. It does, as others do, provide a lightning rod for those who cry out against current policies without having reasonable and well-developed concepts to supplant them with. As Robert pointed out above, he and others like him provide an extreme, but actually possible, COA which usually involves collapsing inward on ourselves.
For over forty years, the United States thought that it knew its role in the world. It was to oppose what was later named the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union and its proxies. Since the fall of the USSR, the US has neither found its role in the post-Cold War world nor discovered how to resolve the myriad of brush fires we ignited to burn the feet of the bear which have since singed us as well.
IMO, a real, reasoned discussion, not a rant or tirade, would likely begin with something akin to what Robert wrote above, include some of the realizations of Sellin's article, and progress... not degrade... from there.
Those are worthy of discussion, not tirades or tired criticisms that, while oppositional and occasionally radical-sounding, offer nothing new, substantive or constructive.
After returning from Iraq, I came away with a feeling that the war against terror in Iraq has morphed into a sort of sick business. A business between Takfiri false Islamic prophets that continue to shed blood for money/power and a hidden Muslim populace, not indigenous to Iraq, who will pay to see the "Infidels" fail in Iraq. How do you contend with this?
The same is happening in Afghanistan. The locals do not like the Taliban but they dislike outsiders even more. But if you are being paid to resist foreigners, it is no longer a matter of ideology, it's economics.
As long as we remain, insurgents will be paid to resist, someone will pay to see the U.S. fail, and their will continue to be power and money in strife and anarchy.