Gone Shopping

Mr. President,

Yes, go shopping Sir. For different Generals. Put in MBA terms:

US Army: chapter 7. The soldiers go to healthy organizations. The leadership meets the private sector.

USMC: chapter 11.

DOD---DA, DN, D of etc...get folded (and cut to 10% of current size) into one DoD organization.

The war: put SOF and USMC (post ch. 11) in charge overall. None of the current Army Commanders stay, except COL McMasters (3d ACR) who should be a 2 Star, today.

If you don't do the above.... "C" level management tasks...any resources you continue to pour in are wasted.

Respectfully

SGT

Iraq

The Price on our Souls

A great deal of "soul searching" in the media lately (soul channel-surfing would be more accurate) about whether fighting is worth the price it takes on our souls.....wrap interrogations up in this weepy holistic blather.

If Americans aren't willing to pay the price of liberty (killing, dying, getting answers from terrorists) then wait until they're paying the price a slave pays to survive.

When this started, I thought the problems in America were largely restricted to the elites. With the last election it appears that we are defending a nation of neurotic, whining de-clawed cats living in a fantasy world subsidized by our sacrifice. America has truly become European for the first time.

Now so late it's never

Much has been written and said since the election about how to turn around the situation in Iraq. Even the President seems alarmed, or maybe just more interested in his work.

At this stage they're no longer recommendations, they're regrets.

All these articles, and Bush suddenly taking an interest in his job should have happened 18 mos ago. Me, I'm concentrating on getting my terps out.

In two weeks the hearings start, and it's over. By Spring the Dems will have so tarred Bush&Co with the contractor (justly) and oil (more nuanced) brushes that he'll be as weak as Nixon in 74 by summer. It's over. Start doing triage, and accept the position of Byzantium at the end of the 7th century.

Oh BTW if you can't read a map, losing Iraq means it's over for Afghanistan as well.

Our Embedded Strengths--or How to solve the lack of Embeds

The real embedded reporters we need are already amongst us down the squad level.

Background: We know we haven't got good press since OIF-I. Part of this is politics, part of it is the reporters don't want to leave the hotel and rely on (unreliable) local stringers, some also feel they lose "objectivity" when they embed with the troops. Worst of all Big Army seems to have developed an aversion of late, as was reported in the Weekly Standard recently (at the time only seven embeds active in Iraq). AQ on the other hand has full reporting down to the cell level (helps to have US/UK educated marketing majors, not to mention all those helpful tips from Al-Jazzera).

We already have new-media savvy, morally unassailable and unabashedly patriotic embeds with public credibility at every level, and the Army needs to harness them and their free speech and get out of their way.

It's our soldiers. Every other public institution in the free world has had to come to grips with free speech and how the new techonology makes everyone a part of the media, Big Army does as well. Don't worry, the ghost of Von Steuben won't frown. He understood his times.

The Choice

VDH lays it out well... " War Stories".. basically between the cut losses, negotiate and 911 was a lucky break, and those who say no...it's an existential conflict.

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson120106.html

Maybe it is the Rapture..

the terps are telling us Jayish-al-Madhi have given the boot to the IP's in Babylon, and are now destroying antiquities there...

Maybe that will get the attention of the West Side Crowd.