The US Army May be at a Breaking Point.
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That's the conclusion of a report written for the Army.
The washington post covered the report:
Scathing New Army War College Report Broadly Criticizes Bush admin on handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat. Why is this on page 12 of the Washington Post? It should be Page one!
Here's an incredible indictment of the incompetence and failure of the Bush policy on terrorism and most newspapers ignore it. Fox and CNN ignore it, and the Washington Post puts it on page 12. You can click on the link above to read the Washington Post article, and the original article is
Here's the link to the whole report, followed by some excerpts. This is worth reading. it makes it so crystal clear that the use of the term WAR ON TERRORISM may be morally clear but it's untrue, misleading and had led the US down the wrong path in defending itself against terrorism.
Some excerpts: :
"the administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have confl ated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous confl ict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.
Of particular concern has been the confl ation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.
This was a strategic error of the fi rst order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the global war on terrorism (GWOT)...
He describes the president's global war on terrorism (GWOT) as "unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As such, the GWOT's goals are also politically, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable."
Accordingly, the GWOT must be recalibrated to conform to concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power.
The specific measures required include deconfl ation of the threat; substitution of credible deterrence for preventive war as the primary vehicle for dealing with rogue states seeking WMD; refocus of the GWOT fi rst and foremost on al-Qaeda, its allies, and homeland security; preparation to settle in Iraq for stability over democracy (if the choice is forced upon us) and for international rather than U.S. responsibility for Iraq's future; and fi nally, a reassessment of U.S. military force levels, especially ground force levels.
The GWOT as it has so far been defi ned and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over too many ends. It violates the fundamental strategic principles of discrimination and concentration.
He quotes military icon Clausewitz, "The great Prussian philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz, believed that the "fi rst, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, not trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."
And then goes on to state, "The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, terrorist organizations, and terrorism itself. It has also, at least for the purposes of mobilizing and sustaining domestic political support for the war on Iraq and other potential preventive military actions, confl ated them as a general, undifferentiated threat. In so doing, the administration has arguably subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it seeks in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a path of open-ended and unnecessary confl ict with states and nonstate entities that pose no direct or imminent threat to the United States."
and more...
"Sound strategy mandates threat discrimination and reasonable harmonization of ends and means. The GWOT falls short on both counts. Indeed, it may be misleading to cast the GWOT as a war; the military's role in the GWOT is still a work in progress, and the military's "comfort level" with it is any event problematic. Moreover, to the extent that the GWOT is directed at the phenomenon of terrorism, as opposed to fl esh-and-blood terrorist organizations, it sets itself up for strategic failure. Terrorism is a recourse of the politically desperate and militarily helpless, and, as such, it is hardly going to disappear. The challenge of grasping the nature and parameters of the GWOT is certainly not eased by the absence of a commonly accepted defi nition of terrorism or by the depiction of the GWOT as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, "us" versus "them.""
