tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7884128379999766348.post2870503992453976740..comments2024-03-28T22:02:16.520-04:00Comments on Politics and its Discontents: Guest Essay From The Mound Of Sound: From Star Wars Back to VerdunLornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15741324981120408977noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7884128379999766348.post-35445259130240111032014-05-05T12:26:47.680-04:002014-05-05T12:26:47.680-04:00And thus, the ineluctable repetition of history in...And thus, the ineluctable repetition of history in Afghanistan, Mound, that the West chose to ignore when it started its futile war there.Lornehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15741324981120408977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7884128379999766348.post-64438606150238570742014-05-05T12:01:55.619-04:002014-05-05T12:01:55.619-04:00In my war studies course I went back through the U...In my war studies course I went back through the US military's counter-insurgency field manual, FM3-24, and the RAND Corp's report, "How Insurgencies End," only to shake my head in wonderment how, in Afghanistan, we ignore every bit of doctrinal wisdom about insurgencies going back to Caesar. Even the field manual annexes the writings of T.E. Lawrence but the way NATO/ISAF carried on you would have thought they'd never heard of him.<br /><br />We fought our war in Afghanistan - the heavy firepower, conventional war of tanks and artillery and strike fighters - leaving the insurgents to wage their war, the political war, largely unmolested. <br /><br />The emerging consensus does indeed seem to be that the Western forces should steer well clear of insurgencies from here on in. We're back to the post-Vietnam syndrome. As with that earlier conflict we're leaving behind a government too corrupt to survive for long that's weakened further by the dependency on Western firepower that we instilled in them. The central government in Kabul can't begin to afford to fund the Afghan National Army. When the foreign money runs out - and it surely will - that army will probably break down into constituent ethnic militias just in time for resumption of the civil war we so rudely interrupted.The Mound of Soundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09023839743772372922noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7884128379999766348.post-28967926394238665322014-05-04T18:26:41.327-04:002014-05-04T18:26:41.327-04:00Boy do I remember "The Millennium Challenge 2...Boy do I remember "The Millennium Challenge 2002". <br /><br />Retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper commanded the Red Team and utterly exposed the asinine group think of the DoD to the point where the exercise was stopped and restarted with the Red Team forced to essentially only do what the DoD told them they could do. The whole thing was a perfect demonstration of Carlin's oxymoron and presaged many aspects of US bungles, miscalculations, missteps and idiocy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Danahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12465953801145126160noreply@blogger.com