I’ve read a good bit of Max Hastings work over the years and enjoyed the bulk of it. His stuff on Korea is classic and sets the bar for other writers to equal.
His comments in the Post today are pretty good. He gets down to the core that the military may have to answer to civilians, but the civilians should stay out of military operations. That’s pretty much been the way the American military has always worked. And it has always worked damn well.
The problem is that civilians tend to want things to always be clean and neat. It’s not something that will ever happen and military leaders tend to get that better. They are pretty much used to things going to hell in a hand basket at first contact. But civilians are more prone to micro-managing things.
Military leaders are trained to issues orders and then step back and let soldiers do their jobs. That’s not an easy thing to do and with the increase in technology over the last 10 years it is even harder for the civilian leadership to do.
Nobody wants a large body count, and both sets of leaders don’t want the American military to be seen as blood thirsty banditos. But the civilian leadership does not have the stomach to let the military do what they are trained to do, and suffer the losses that are going to come with it.
We need to let them do their jobs. That’s the bottom line.
I had more to comment here...
