- One of the clichés one hears incessantly from
the mouths of politicians is that we have the "best-trained, best-equipped
Army" in the world.
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- No we don't. We have a military that is overstretched
and underequipped because it has more missions than resources. We have
a military that is suffering from a leadership crisis. We have a military
with way too many women in it. We have a military that still suffers from
logistics problems.
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- Don't take my word for it. Go to www.sftt.org. This is
a site set up by Col. David Hackworth - a fellow King Features columnist
- that, among other things, invites comments from officers and men actually
on the battlefield. We have soldiers who didn't get the vests they needed.
We have unarmored Humvees that have cost Americans dearly. And, to hear
the enlisted men and young officers tell it, we have about the worst military
leadership at the top since Abraham Lincoln struggled to find a general
who knew how to fight. Unbelievably, many soldiers in Iraq have had to
purchase equipment on the open market because it was better than the Army
stuff or because the Army stuff wasn't available.
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- And we have promiscuous medal-giving. Some of our top
generals look like stereotypes of Latin American dictators with their ribbons
and medals. Then there was the case of the young West Virginia girl who
was made a celebrity and given a medal for bravery even though she herself
said she never fired her weapon and was knocked unconscious by a vehicle
crash. She was honest. The brass were not.
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- The general sense conveyed by these young men is that
a young officer who follows the warrior's path and takes care of his men
is never going to make it beyond major. To go beyond requires an entirely
different approach based on social and political skills as well as on avoiding
all of the politically incorrect traps.
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- We have seen how the military reacted to soldiers voicing
criticism or even pessimism to the press. They were told to shut up in
no uncertain terms. At the same time, we saw that disgraceful episode in
which some soldiers were persuaded to sign a boilerplate letter to their
hometown papers saying how everything was peachy-creamy, hunky-dory in
Iraq.
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- Well, the military suffers for the same reason public
education suffers. Essentially it is an organization designed and run by
politicians and bureaucrats.
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- It is easy for the politicians to oversell the military
situation, because they have been careful not to allow the military to
fight any country with one-tenth of the resources to put up a good fight.
The last time we did, in Vietnam, we lost. Yes, I know we never lost a
battle on the field. We lost in Washington, D.C., but we did lose. When
the fighting stops and the enemy holds the ground, we've lost, whatever
excuse you want to make about it.
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- I highly recommend Col. Hackworth's Web site. You will
get more truth from there in one five-minute visit than in listening to
Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for 10 hours.
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- The only protection the ordinary fighting man has is
informed and aroused citizens who demand of their politicians that problems
be corrected. That's especially true when the top generals and admirals
fail in an officer's most basic duty, which is to look out for the men
and women under his command.
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- http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040315/index.php
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