March 6: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
March 7: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
March 8: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
March 9: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
March 10: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
As the good nuns used to tell me back in parochial school, actions speak louder than words. What the CENTCOM commander says matters less than what CENTCOM forces do. What they are doing is waging an endless war of attrition.
Ludendorff Would Have Approved
"Punch a hole and let the rest follow."
During the First World War, that aphorism, attributed to General Erich Ludendorff, captured the essence of the German army's understanding of strategy, rooted in the conviction that violence perpetrated on a sufficient scale over a sufficient period of time will ultimately render a politically purposeless war purposeful. The formula didn't work for Germany in Ludendorff's day and yielded even more disastrous results when Hitler revived it two decades later.
Of course, U.S. military commanders today don't make crude references to punching holes. They employ language that suggests discrimination, deliberation, precision, and control as the qualities that define the American way of war. They steer clear of using terms like attrition. Yet differences in vocabulary notwithstanding, the U.S. military's present-day MO bears a considerable resemblance to the approach that Ludendorff took fully a century ago. And for the last decade and a half, U.S. forces operating in the CENTCOM AOR have been no more successful than were German forces on the Western Front in achieving the purposes that ostensibly made war necessary.
To divert attention from this disturbing fact, General Votel offers Congress and by extension the American people a 64-page piece of propaganda. Whether he himself is deluded or dishonest is difficult to say, just as it remains difficult to say whether General William Westmoreland was deluded or dishonest when he assured Congress in November 1967 that victory in Vietnam was in sight. "With 1968," Westmoreland promised, "a new phase is now starting. We have reached an important point when the end begins now to come into view."
Westmoreland was dead wrong, as the enemy's 1968 Tet Offensive soon demonstrated. That a comparable disaster, no doubt different in form, will expose Votel's own light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel assessment as equally fraudulent is a possibility, even if one to which American political and military leaders appear to be oblivious. This much is certain: in the CENTCOM AOR the end is not even remotely in view.
What are we to make of this charade of proconsuls parading through Washington to render false or misleading reports on the status of the American empire's outer precincts?
Perhaps the time has come to look elsewhere for advice and counsel. Whether generals like Votel are deluded or dishonest is ultimately beside the point. More relevant is the fact that the views they express -- and that inexplicably continue to carry weight in Washington -- are essentially of no value. So many years later, no reason exists to believe that they know what they are doing.
To reground U.S. national security policy in something that approximates reality would require listening to new voices, offering views long deemed heretical.
Let me nonetheless offer you an example:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
