In a comment to this morning piece someone made the following observation: ... as long as the civilians in the Pentagon want to micromanage the war with blinders on ...
This isn't a view I share.
The military isn't a a single static institution, it is many interests, some organic, some external, and all changing over time, all interacting with each other. It isn't organically self-managing.
At some point in time there was a military threat. The threat model was well understood. There were two mutually-exclusive choices how to respond. The "thrusters" wanted an immediate xxxxx-xxxxxx drive, hoping to save forward positions such as xxxxxxxxxxx as a side-effect, while "cautionaries" favored a step-by-step approach, taking into consideration the xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx problems and xxxxxxxxx risks that would be involved, even though forward positions such as xxxxxxxxxxx would (temporarily) be lost.
What fact situation does this describe, and what should the civilians in the Pentagon do?
Its War Plan Orange and the proper course of action was the one taken. Do nothing at first. The "thrusters" course of action would have put the deciding naval action of the Pacific War in the Eastern Pacific in the first half of 1942, with no carrier reserve, against superior forces at a logistical disadvantage. Fortunately, Perl Harbor ruled out a "thrust" by the combined Pacific fleet lead by battleships begun under the Fiscal Year 1906-1919 programs, supported CV 2, CV 3 and CV 6. Caution then prevailed.
Viewed in the context of War Plan Orange, the problem isn't that civilians are micromanaging anything, it is that the "thrusters" won out over the "cautionaries", out of uniform and in uniform, and the United States is now engaged in a "thrust battle", with no reserves, against numerically supperior forces and at a logistical disadvantage.
Posted by EBW at October 29, 2004 03:45 PM | TrackBack