The New Era

The New Era - In the mid-eighties, historian Edwin Luttwak - one of the world's foremost military historians - published "The Pentagon and the Art of War", a sweeping critique of the Pentagon of the era. Published in the wake of military failures in Vietnam, the Mayaguez incident), the Desert One fiasco in Iran and Lebanon, and the costly, clumsy success of the Grenada invasion, Luttwak's book questioned the structure and goals of the US military, up to and emphasizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The US military, from the JCS on down, had one overriding strategery; to preserve and protect the US military. The symptoms were everywhere, and they were awful, to the student of military history. Every military operation of any size was preceded by a protracted set of negotiations to ensure that all four services got their piece of the action; officers need combat time to ensure promotions, and officers of each service wanted their piece of the action, even when it was clearly inappropriate for their service to be involved.

As a result, operations like Grenada, Desert One and the Mayaguez incident became huge, bloated, combined-services operations, lumping units that had never trained together into task forces that were ill-suited to the mission; for example, there was no reason the Grenada mission needed the 82nd Airborne Division or the USAF; it was a mission tailor-made for the Marines.

This obsessive niggling over turf became a substitute for having a coherent national strategy; it became institutionalized in the form of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a group whose primary mission was more to negotiate the boundaries where military turf would be shared than to actually develop a coherent strategy.

Powerline points to an excerpt from Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Rumsfeld's War", and perhaps the best piece of evidence that that has changed under the Bush Administration:

Rumsfeld's instant declaration of war, previously unreported, took America from the Clinton administration's view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration's view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed.
This would be a global war, Rumsfeld said, and he planned to give Special Operations forces — Delta Force, SEALs and Green Berets — unprecedented powers to kill terrorists.

On July 22, [Rumsfeld] initialed a highly classified directive to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Rumsfeld directive is just one page, but its impact was historic: The defense secretary changed the nature of Special Operations forces — and the Pentagon — by giving commanders the authority to plan and execute missions on their own with a minimum of bureaucratic interference.

And with that, 56 years of bureacracy-centered direction was officially declared dead (if not actually buried in terms of day-to-day operation).

Powerline and others have talked at length about Bush's doctrine serving as a national Grand Strategy. This snapshot illustrates it.

Read it all, of course.

Posted by Mitch at February 24, 2004 06:24 AM