[July 29, 2016] Army Vet writes today that America’s military is FAILING us as a nation.
I’m older now, much older, where things should be clearer through know-how and schooling; up till now that’s positively not the way things are working out for me. There’s something been chewing at my gut for years … while the character of war is changing, America’s military is failing our nation. Our armed forces are not accomplishing the mission of protecting what we consider important; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American’s have enshrined “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in our Constitution by The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America and our fight for freedom.
Our military is failing but not be for a lack of trying. The old ways of military leaders doing business with civilian political leaders is based on Huntington’s logic1 is outmoded and dangerous. This problem can be summarized by a widely circulated statement on a whiteboard in a Forward Operating Base in Iraq – “America is not at War. The Marines are at War. America is at the Mall.” Yep, we’ve known for a long time that Huntington’s thesis doesn’t reflect reality today but no senior leader has done anything about it. The old way of our military remaining isolated from politics remains the easy way.
What is it that our military is failing to do … specifically! For the sake of the uneducated here, I’m not talking about taking civilians out of the decision loop when it comes to war; civilians are there by conscious design constitutionally and by law. The problem is, as any man off the street can tell you, civilians are wholly ignorant of the purpose of the military and are completely clueless on how it operates. This includes most of the intellectually lazy, craven, senior politicians that I know. The dope smoking of their youth, which would disqualify them from military service, has not done them much good either for their understanding.
Here are five important ways our military fails us:
- They never provide their “best military advice,” but what they consider to be the “best politically correct advice.”
- They don’t build professional relationships with the political and business class. Furthermore, they don’t understand what drives them.
- They lack the fortitude to recommend winning solutions that are expensive in terms of lives of soldiers or civilians.
- They don’t venture outside military solutions and are reluctant to incorporate non-military assets into their mission resources.
- … and most important of all; the fail to destroy the enemy ideologically or through manpower attrition. In short, they don’t win wars anymore and have no desire to do so.
It is the sworn duty of our military leaders to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. More than ever before military leaders in the United States are not defending us yet they also consciously remain grossly ignorant of our national politics and grand strategy. This lack of understanding, a willful ignorance is what I’ll call it, fundamentally biases our military. They believe in doing the right thing but their actions have failed us as much as our civilian leaders have failed us too.
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- See this review: http://warhorsesim.com/papers/reviews/huntington.soldierandstate.htm