Yet Again Proving We Need More Than One Party That Understands Warfare
Update: The great Fumento points to a version of his article with hyperlinks at his place. I’m honored he dropped by here.
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This article should not have to come from the rightish Weekly Standard. First, it shouldn’t need to have been written in the first place; the vow to “double the size of our Special Forces” should have been crushed or made viable by some military-savvy Dem. Secondly, the concepts in this article are not Republican or Democrat concepts; they’re military. This kind of correction should have equally been able to come from The Nation as it would The Weekly Standard. Michael Fumento writes:
First, doubling can only be accomplished by going a disastrous route–making special ops no longer special. Second, false solutions crowd out real ones. Much can be done to improve the quality of our armed forces, but this Democratic proposal doesn’t make the grade.
Just as it’s disturbing that in 31 pages the Democrats couldn’t devote a single line to how they plan to achieve their lofty goal, it’s unsettling that they can’t get their definitions right. “Special Forces,” properly speaking, refers to U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. But, as Drew Hammill in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office confirmed to me, what the Democrats want to double is the much broader group of “Special Operations Forces”–SOF in military shorthand, or just “special ops.”
I can understand some random congressman messing up SOF and SF, or “clandestine” with “covert”, which are terms of art. That congressman should have staffers who understand this stuff, who served (and not exclusively one tour guys), who do research to get these terms right, who know that when they propose something like this they come up against the SOF culture and their “four truths“:
- Humans are more important than hardware.
- Quality is better than quantity.
- Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
- Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.
Peter Beinart, a fellow with whom I’ve sometimes disagreed, has been an inspiration for this argument over the years (this link should work as a search for “Beinart” on this site). He also understands that both parties need institutions, processes and cultural understanding that support a knowledge of warfare and the military. Democrats such as Congressman Ike Skelton, driving the military over the decades to direct resources to war colleges and joint training–or Senator Inouye, Medal of Honor winner who fiercely protects his constituency’s military infrastructure and maintains close ties to Hawaii military–are the exception rather than the rule. As the Fumento article indicates, a plank in one party’s platform depends on a logical fallacy and mischaracterizes the intent of the plank through ignorance. Institutions that disregard the core of why national government exists (monopoly on force) don’t effectively serve the public. The Republicans make big mistakes on occasion with regard to understanding the military, but at least they have think tanks that accept the existence of war, and guys who served who aren’t only in military-heavy districts, and connections to be able to reach out to understand the military concerns even if they’re not doing so sometimes. Who’s building those connections now for the Democrats as well as the Republicans?
8 Responses to “Yet Again Proving We Need More Than One Party That Understands Warfare”
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February 25th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Yet Again Proving We Need More Than One Party That Understands Warfare…
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February 25th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Thanks for linking to my article and for your thoughtful comments. As it happens, the version I’ve posted on my website not only has lots of pretty pictures but a ton of hyperlinks that I think a lot of your readers will find useful.
http://www.fumento.com/military/specialops.html
February 25th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
A fatuous promise…
Michael Fumento doesn’t like a plank of a political platform. The “Four Truths” are mentioned. I comment about it at my place. At one point I was a darn good bus driver for SEALs. Today I do staff work that……
February 26th, 2007 at 9:56 am
[...] Hat tip to blogger friend Buck, who credits Chapomatic, and also achieved an early nomination for our Best Sentence award: “Special,†in the Dem lexicon, has more to do with things like the Special Olympics than Special Forces. I despair of the Dems ever understanding the difference. Share This Article With Others:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
February 26th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Dawn Patrol…
Welcome to the Dawn Patrol, our daily roundup of information on the War on Terror and other topics – from the MilBlogs and other sources around the world. If you’re a blogger, you can join the conversation. If you link……
February 26th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Thank you for this analysis, it’s very helpful and clarifying.
February 26th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
I did a bit on mountain warfare, its necessities and such and the problems faced with it… plus my normal hits on congress with this post. One of my points has always been that expanding military forces must be done slowly so as to not dilute the skills that exist, the training structure or the overall force-structure and to get the logistics in place for handling a larger force. All of that takes time… years of it. The days of mass warfare are over, and the idea of a draft military brings up the problem of what to do with the people who can’t hack it, as the skills necessary to fight today are a different magnitude than WWII, Korea or even Vietnam. The great quip that the Gulf War was won on the playing fields of Atari is not too far from the truth… compare the average skills need for a Sherman tank to an Stryker, and that base need has gone upwards. Even if it could be done the production rate for such are low enough to make any war today a ‘come as you are’ war. With equal factory space for aircraft production to that of Germany in ‘43, they produced up to 4,000 aircraft/month, the US of today 1/month.
We can fight a different kind of war and use all the tools in the National Toolkit handed to us from 1787, but that also requires dropping most of our ideas of what a Nation means from the 20th century. We have transformed warfare. Now can we transform our ideas of what war is and how to address it?
February 27th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
H&I Fires 27 FEB 2007…
Open post for those with something to share, updated through the day. New, complete posts come in below this one. Note: If trackbacking, please acknowledge this post in your post. That’s only polite. You’re advertising here, we should get an……