Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Incredibly sharp and focused, with aims and goals that match up well with mine, a no-nonsense way of dealing with things, and an unwillingness to allow form to triumph over substance. How many people would have even tried to give an honest answer to the soldier's question about armor? I can think of several in his position in the past who would have stammered a quick "we'll look into it" non-answer.
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You're right. Fuck 'em if they can't take an honest "(a) it's a problem of physics (even though our vendors have offered to increase production), and (b) look, you might get blown up in a tank anyway, so back to the landfill!"
I didn't really find Rumsfeld's response disarmingly honest, but OTOH, it's not what really bugs me about the man.
I think most of his critics focus more on things like the fact that he ignored Shinseki's Army planning office, the State Department, and pretty much everyone else with expertise in post-war nationbuilding, and as a result fucked up things pretty royally. In fact, Maj. Wilson now tells us that DoD
never wrote down a Phase IV plan at all.
- The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.
"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.
"While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans' operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse" -- that is, laid out how U.S. forces would be moved and structured, Wilson writes in an essay that has been delivered at several academic conferences but not published. "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations."
Armored Humvees and Autopens are nice theatre, but really they're only theatre in comparison to the man's larger problems.
