Monday, October 24, 2011

Giving Away the Store

Has America's involvement in Iraq been called on account of the 2012 presidential election?  With the status of force agreement with Iraq expiring, the Obama administration failed to negotiate a deal to allow at least several thousand combat troops in the country beyond the end of this year.  A cynical person might argue the administration allowed the negotiations to fail because it wanted out so it could report a full pull-out to its base.  Reelection politics cannot drive national security policy in general and strategic decisions regarding the War on Terror in particular.

The left has consistently complained that Operation Iraqi Freedom was another Vietnam, but ironically it is a leftist president who risks turning a hard fought, bloody victory into a defeat.  if a weak Iraq is torn apart or manipulated and exploited by an ascendent Iran for its own purposes than President Obama will have abandoned the thousands of troops killed and wounded to secure victory and  delivered another Vietnam.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

The New Project

"Six Kinds of Camouflage: Why the Pentagon Needs to be Fixed." This is the working title of the book I am working on.  It had its beginnings in the "Transformation" chapter of my book, "A Short History of the Long War."  Two key themes will be consolidation and generalization in the face of too much separateness and specialization among and between the services.  With the expected budget cuts and reductions in force levels over the next decade more will truly have to be done with less.

Chapters will cover topics like:

teeth to tail ratio
plan 1945
growing gap between trigger pullers and point and clickers
people versus technology
unit reorganization
privatizing the VA