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Sunday Reading
December 21, 2008 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 1:33pm | 21 Comments
Lots of good op-ed and editorial columns today:
Enough with the Militarization, Already (The Washington Post):
Enough with the Militarization, Already (The Washington Post):
Is it good that the U.S. military has taken the lead on, well, everything?Trimming the Military Budget, Part I (The New York Times):
The F-22, the DDG-1000, the Virginia class submarine, the V-22, Nukes, (blue water) Navy and Air Force? All bad. The Army, Marine Corps, Reserves and (brown water) Navy? All good. Readers of this blog will note that the New York Times has a crush on us. Is this staff editorial, then, a love letter? Because you guys are harsher on the USAF and USN than even we are.Trimming the Military Budget, Part II (The New York Times)
Time to plan -- and budget -- jointly.Iraqi Soldiers Hooked on Drugs (The New York Times)
This isn't an op-ed or editorial. It's just a depressing article. You too will need Xanax by the end of it. There might have been some other good stuff in the Times today, but my mom had thrown the paper away by the time I returned home from church. (Where I prayed for the Iraqi Army.) I did not, I confess, get the chance to skim the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. This last article, though, comes via Dave at SWJ.Why does our Army suck? (The Sunday Times of London)
Key graph: Pride has certainly come before a fall. British commanders underestimated both the enemy’s effectiveness and the Americans’ ability to adapt. Some apparently failed even to observe how much had changed. At a meeting in August 2007 an American described Major-General Jonathan Shaw, then British commander, as “insufferable”, lecturing everyone in the room about lessons learnt in Northern Ireland, which apparently set eyeballs rolling: “It would be okay if he was best in class, but now he’s worst in class.”
Goodness gracious. I'm not sure if the British Army is as rubbish as Michael Portillo thinks, but it is significant that -- after several years in which the British Army seemed to elude any criticism from the British press, which instead directed its barbs toward those ill-disciplined Yanks -- voices have emerged who have really questioned the effectiveness of the British Army in that mission at which they were supposed to be the acknowledged experts: COIN.
Dave tries to talk our pale friends back from the edge of the cliff here. I will say, though, that Portillo is wrong to say all the blame lies with the politicians. If the British have failed to keep pace with the Americans with respect to COIN doctrine, that is a failure of the British Army and its officer corps. I know several senior British generals who understand this, even if Portillo does not.
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