Re: Limiting Warfare - A Favorite Topic
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Forty-One</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
SHARING</div></div>"Please give your orders," replied Boisberthelot.
"It is for you to give them, you are the captain."
"But you are the general," replied Boisberthelot.
And therein lies the problem.
For the last twenty years, public announcements of military strategy have been couched in the language of speed and flexibility. After all, how could something we call a ‘Rapid Deployment Force’ be anything but fast and adaptable? Yet history teaches that superior weaponry and the best laid plans for highly mobile warfare can be stopped dead by geography, as it was on the banks of the Marne almost one hundred years ago. So why is it impossible for those in charge to admit publicly that, ten years later, an effective military solution in Afghanistan might have nothing to do with throwing more men at the problem?
Our vast collection of sophisticated weaponry is no different than a single rifle: just a tool, inanimate, with its proper and effective use dependent on the will of its owner. Our remarkable military arsenal is useless absent a military leadership able to doubt itself enough to abandon its preconceptions and create a victory as imagined by the personal intelligence of the individual officer. Our enemy already knows this. The least we can do is to acknowledge it ourselves.
