Facebook

Twitter

StumbleUpon

Email

topics:

World

vote downundo vote up flag

worldaffairsjournal.org - 1/14/2009

The Human Element: When Gadgetry Becomes Strategy

—

Wrong, terribly wrong T he wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the political debates concerning the nature and scope of U.S. involvement in those countries, have resurrected the “lessons” of Vietnam once again. Far from having kicked the “Vietnam syndrome,” as President George H. W. Bush ...

Leave a Comment

Strategy and Gadgetry
Mudville Gazette — H.R. McMaster in World Affairs: The Human Element: When Gadgetry Becomes Strategy. Not disagreeing with him here, but in reading any analysis of any sort of strategic shortfall in 2003-2004 Iraq planning and execution, I remind myself that all such shortfalls are defined by enemy responses to our actions. As the enemy would have responded differently to different actions, those could now be identified as failures too had we executed them with something less than perfect results. (A likely outcome regardless of our actions.) As ...

Why We Failed
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — ... a new article by H. R. McMaster, a U.S. Army Colonel who has advised Petraeus. It's well worth reading as a guide to the limts of Rumsfeldism. ...

Three Of These Things Are Not Like The Others
Jules Crittenden — ... McMaster goes deep to examine the complexities overlooked by simple Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan analogies at World Affairs Journal : How and why did America go to war in these places, and what best explains the subsequent course of these wars?… It is true that the conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan exhibit many more differences than similarities. But while the uniqueness of Vietnam limits what we might apply directly from that experience, an examination of how and why Vietnam became an American war and what went wrong there can also help us think more clearly about the ...

OxBlog — ... He might be remembered as the architect of escalation and disaster in the Vietnam war. His arithmetically elaborate, mechanistic approach to war planning and strategy turned out to be folly. Business acumen and organisational genius were no substitutes for sound strategic judgment. The fragility of America's client state in Saigon, the boundless political will of the communists, and the sheer difficulty of running a manpower-intensive war of divisive military occupation - these problems wrecked his war. ...