In the military of long ago, some very clever men figured that there was a natural selection process that was shaping the future leadership of the military and navy and that at a certain point, about midway through the ranks up to general or admiral there was a time when almost all the weak and incompetent had been sent home, died or invalided out of the service. This was the perfect time to select the best remaining officers and send them to school to learn all they could about strategy and military policy and international relations and prepare them to shape and execute the grand strategies of a nation not bent on war or imperialism but likely nonetheless to find itself athwart the interests of nations that were interested in such things.
At the War Colleges, for there were two of them back then, all the students studied the great works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Navy), Clausewitz, (both Army and Navy) and of course Thucydides. They read the books that each of those men wrote and then sat around and discussed them together to thrash out what each meant and in what state our military could be compared to the forces that were employed and discussed in each of the great works on War.*
In other words, they went back to school for a year and took the time to look at the nuts and bolts of making war successfully and then went on to Command and to staff jobs where that learning would be employed and called upon over and over through the decades. Other students were at the War Colleges from both other countries and from places like our own State Department. They got the same insights into how making war differs from staggering down to the pub of an evening and drinking a couple of gallons of beer.
There is no sign that any country in the world has adopted anything like the old War Colleges for training its permanent secretaries and under ministers who enter government service at 22 years of age and remain there for life while slowly moving up the ranks to positions of greater power and prestige. These fallow minds show up with the knowledge gleaned from a university education for undergraduates and may round it out with an advanced degree in Art History or Economics but neither one of them really prepares them for meaningful service reinforced with the background and education to further the nation's foreign policy through pressure or military means. They achieve senior positions without a clue about what their country requires in order to successfully function as a political situation morphs into a military situation.
They are pig ignorant and yet they're the ones that are made Minister of War or Minister of Defense or Foreign Minister and they are as clueless about actual war as any room found in the Palace of Versailles stuffed with French generals and admirals is about how a country prepares for and wages war successfully. They never take the time to even think about it and so they don't hesitate to slash the budget for procurement, for training, for repairs and maintenance or for research and development and introduction of new and better weapons or prepare to blunt the newer better weapons being developed by other countries.
If what I hear and read about the low state of our War Colleges is true today, I suppose we're no better now than the rest of NATO. Permitting the study of anything other than war, strategy, national defense policy at the War College is to waste and destroy the opportunity offered by a year off to study the practical application of violence on a scale that nobody else in the world even dreams exists.
If our War Colleges were still of any use at all, somebody somewhere would point to our naval requirements in the Pacific and ask, where is all the fuel for the ships and military aircraft now stored and how capable are we in supplying Battle Groups waging war at sea with fuel, stores and munitions for 8 to 12 months from existing stocks already in the Pacific? Where are the repair ships and depots to make combat repairs and return damaged ships quickly to service? Where will the enormous numbers of men come from to wage war for 12 months at a full burn rate similar to our worst days in Korea or Vietnam or World War II?
We have piddled bravely all over the world for the last 55 years without taking, in all that time, the casualties that we used to take in a single day of combat in World War II. Once we use up all the ships, submarines, aircraft and men and women in the current Pacific Fleet what are we going to do for an encore? This is that time of year that comes around every year when some people natter on about the decision Truman made to drop the Atomic Bomb and some people are always on hand to point out that we were just making the first moves to take the enormous war machine we unleashed on the Germans and turn it around and send it to fight Japan and didn't need the bomb. Well, that's not an option anymore.
When I served on active duty, our National Security Policy was to field a military large enough to fight and win 2 wars simultaneously. It got whittled down, as they do, to fight one war and hold in another war until we finished off that bad guy and could turn our full attention to enemy number 2. Again, those forces are long gone. There are always going to be people who should know better who are going to crow about how we blew the doors of Iran but let's be honest, no we didn't. And that means something more when you stop and consider that we spend about 1000 times more on defense than Iran spends on everything.
One of the sad things we are all learning as the details ooze out, is that our Intel Community is really worse than pathetic, it is incompetent and manned by thoroughly incompetent pissants. That matters because the only way any country will really attack us again is by surprise, you know, like on 9/11 and where exactly was the Intel Community back then? And do you really think it got better since 2001 or much much worse?
The American people paid through the nose for a capability that they all believe exists and it is time to clarify things so they get a more accurate picture of America's role on the World Stage. Europeans are stupid enough to blunder into a war with Russia or China but we really need to make sure that we stay smarter and more informed than they are because they have the most dismal track record for blundering into existential wars that drag in everybody else on the planet.
7 comments:
Speaking of Iran vs America guess who has the ability to enrich Uranium?
Not the USA. Too dirty, too nasty for the EPA you know.
Between non-war college "Leadership" passing off shore our rare earth refining and manufacturing... gee Wally why dose Raytheon have warehouses of missles ready for use but for some rare earth bits China hasn't sent?
"some people natter on about the decision Truman made to drop the Atomic Bomb and some people are always on hand to point out that we were just making the first moves to take the enormous war machine we unleashed on the Germans and turn it around and send it to fight Japan and didn't need the bomb."
Yeah, and we didn't need the 100,000+ purple heart awards that were manufactured in preparation of the event. Still using the surplus, or so I have been told....
30 years ago the Army Director of Weapon Systems was lamenting that the US Army was scrambling because the very last American fuze maker was telling the Army it wasn't making fuzes no more. When I started at SPAWAR the Navy and perhaps all of DoD was responding to SECDEF tasking to tell him what weapons/weapon systems, sensors etc we were deploying that were made with non-American made parts and how dire was it if the Chinese stopped selling us parts to build our war machine. Nothing changed.
One could argue that the decision to attack Japan was a strategic decision and so also was the decision to attack cities in Japan with Atomic weapons weeks after the USSR finally decided to declare war on Japan and start the long long process of posturing forces into the East to attack Japan in China and Manchuria/Manchukuo. One could argue they were the same strategic decision but they were not. They were two very different Strategic decisions. A simple atomic attack on Japan also made it devastatingly clear to Stalin that we did indeed have atomic weapons and that his posture in the West damned sure better reflect that and that he better pull his forces up short before deciding that he had the men, material and will to take every square inch of Europe because he thought he could beat the USA and he probably knew as well as we did and the British, that Europe (all of it) was on the point of starving to death.
Thus it wasn't to end the war quickly that was the motivating force to drop those two bombs. That actually barely entered the real realm of the decision and its strategic impact. Those two bombs had to be dropped on Japan before they were dropped on Moscow.
Almost nobody alive knows that the actual strategic policy of Deterrence actually started the first week of August 1945.
Oh and of course when you see that it was so, you understand the incredible drive to make the damned things small enough and light enough to drop using naval carrier planes because Moscow and the other rampart cities this side of the Urals were a long way for a bomber to fly over defended territory but a dozen carrier strike groups heading into the Baltic was a piece of cake, once we sailed them around from the Pacific.
It baffled me how people do not understand that not everyone thinks like people with liberal arts degrees, and some of different thinkers are quite nasty. Having the most powerful military on Earth is what allows the liberal arts people to live in peace.
I wish we still had a powerful military.
I am rather glad we shed the vast bulk of the power at the end of WWII. It was unaffordable and it led to ideas that would have made us all less American. The Cold War played out to the most optimistic scenario anyone ever envisioned for that long conflict and the results today could not be better. It is true that Europe pissed away everything but the important thing to keep in mind was that it was THEIRS to piss away.
I am tired of all those everywhere that want us to rearm so we can 'police' China. That is not our role among sovereign nations and the damned liberals and damned neocons just flat out refuse to believe it. They want us to make weapons and make no mistake, they want us to go to war. That is not the American way. We fight on OUR terms, not anybody else's. Whoever is running the Far East will still deal with us as they have always dealt with us and yeah, I know damned well that they are not our friends, so what?
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