aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, May 20, 2007

It’s Patriotic To Criticize

I’ve been meaning to read the full Armed Forces Journal piece by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling entitled A Failure in Generalship, pointed to again last week after the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. “Randy” Mixon, said that he did not have enough troops.

I have read Fred Kaplan’s piece in Slate, It’s Patriotic To Criticize: How our generals got so mediocre. It’s conclusion:

Of the five extra brigades that President Bush ordered to Baghdad as part of his “surge” back in February, only three have arrived; the fifth won’t be on the ground until late summer. Why not? Because they won’t be ready until then; they won’t be fully manned, trained, or equipped. When critics and retired officers say that the U.S. Army is at the end of its tether, they’re not exaggerating. If a crisis in another hot spot erupted, and if the president wanted to send ground troops to deal with it, he couldn’t without transferring units from Iraq or Afghanistan. There is no slack.

And here is where the messages of Maj. Gen. Mixon and Lt. Col. Yingling intersect. Yingling makes clear that it’s the political leaders who decide whether to go to war. Once the policy-maker receives military advice that there aren’t enough troops to achieve the war’s strategic objectives, he or she “must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means.”

President Bush has done neither. He has evaded this calculation from the beginning and continues to do so now that everyone plainly realizes there are not, and never were, enough troops. The next president will have to take up the big questions: What kind of threats do we face? What kind of military forces-and military leaders-do we need? How much will that effort cost? If we don’t have the resources (in troops, money, or will), should we whip up the passions to get more-or scale back to a more realistic policy? The current course-pursuing grand global visions with depleted means-is a surefire road to disaster.