A February
article in Foreign Policy Magazine caught my eye at the time, but jogged my
memory after the terror attacks in Brussels. The gist of the article was that
there was nothing to worry about in the small size of the military budget, we
are spending plenty of money on defense. The argument in the article was that any
appearance of US military weakness was due to the Constitutional limitations imposed
by US civilian control of the military. As
a Vietnam Era veteran, I could not let that go unchallenged, especially now
after we know about ISIS terror networks in Europe.
First, the
primary argument of the article, that our military is well funded and strong
militarily is hogwash. The state of our
military is really bad. Our procurement practices add several years and tens of
billions of dollars to our costs. Most of the airplanes we're flying are as old or older
than the pilots, although they may have new electronics. Our training budgets have been slashed. We
have fewer ships, soldiers and sailors than we did in the 1930's, when our
weakness contributed to the start of World War II. The article is completely
wrong in each and every particular on that score.
But
inefficiency in war not only wastes time, it wastes lives and results in
disastrous failures. And inefficiency from the Commander in Chief does the most damage. Lyndon Johnson ran the
Vietnam War from the White House during his term in office. He ran it inefficiently, incurring many more
American and Vietnamese casualties than would have been necessary if he had
listened to sound military advice. In particular, Johnson wasted the
overwhelming US advantage in air power by attacking targets that didn't matter.
Johnson chose targets primarily to “send a message,” not to gain military
advantage. When Nixon finally decided to
use US air power effectively, Operation Linebacker II shutdown about 90% of the
flow of supplies to North Vietnam in less than a month. If we had done that in
1965 instead of 1972, the cost and aftermath of the Vietnam War would have been
vastly different. US casualties might have been less than 15,000 instead of
over 55,000. Pol Pot might not have been able to kill 2 million Cambodians. The North Vietnamese would have been less
likely to violate any peace agreement, because the US would have been more
likely to keep its commitment of continued military aid plus air support, in
1965, if the North Vietnamese invaded the South. As it was, the US made both those promises,
but kept neither.
Barack
Obama is running the war against ISIS from the White House, just like Lyndon
Johnson ran Vietnam. If anything, Obama is much more restrictive and less
efficient than Johnson ever thought of being. According to some military
sources, Obama canceled the orders to attack Bashar al-Assad's air force at the
same time we initially attacked ISIS. That decision alone probably killed
100,000 Syrian civilians and created the opening for Russia to enter the war in
support of Assad. The decision to not
bomb ISIS controlled oil fields in Syria for fear of environmental damage, and
not to bomb ISIS oil transport trucks for fear of killing the civilian drivers,
made the failure to bomb Assad’s air force even worse. It let ISIS sell
hundreds of millions of dollars in black market oil in Turkey and use the
proceeds to fund establishing a large and threatening terror network in Europe.
Delays in war have hidden costs, but they usually are very real and very large. Frittering away time costs lives.
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