[iwar] [fc:Bureaucrats.Vs..Warriors]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-31 05:35:12


Return-Path: <sentto-279987-3715-1004535305-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com>
Delivered-To: fc@all.net
Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:36:07 -0800 (PST)
Received: (qmail 27357 invoked by uid 510); 31 Oct 2001 13:34:20 -0000
Received: from n13.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.63) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 31 Oct 2001 13:34:20 -0000
X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-3715-1004535305-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com
Received: from [10.1.4.55] by n13.groups.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 31 Oct 2001 13:32:21 -0000
X-Sender: fc@red.all.net
X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com
Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_0_1); 31 Oct 2001 13:35:05 -0000
Received: (qmail 19012 invoked from network); 31 Oct 2001 13:35:04 -0000
Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 31 Oct 2001 13:35:04 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta3 with SMTP; 31 Oct 2001 13:35:03 -0000
Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id f9VDZCY22191 for iwar@onelist.com; Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:35:12 -0800
Message-Id: <200110311335.f9VDZCY22191@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
X-Mailer: don't even ask
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3]
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:35:12 -0800 (PST)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Bureaucrats.Vs..Warriors]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

National Review online
October 29, 2001
Bureaucrats Vs. Warriors
The makeup of our forces.
By Paul A. Rahe, Jay P. Walker Professor of History at the University of
Tulsa. His book Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and
the American Revolution is available in a three-volume paperback edition
from the University of North Carolina Press.
Two decades ago, I had the privilege of lunching five days a week with a
distinguished student of Greek tragedy who had fought in the Spanish Civil
War with the international brigades and then in the Second World War with
the Office of Strategic Services. He liked to talk about what had transpired
in Spain and about his subsequent adventures behind enemy lines in France
and Italy, and I liked to listen. One day, however, I interrupted him to ask
why he had opted for graduate school after World War II and why he had not
pursued a career in the armed services. He laughed. "There is," he observed,
"no place for a warrior in a peacetime army." 
I was reminded of my friend's remark by a brief digression that I recently
read in a report by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker. According to Hersh,
on the first night of our airborne assault against the Taliban in
Afghanistan, an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft, operated by the
Central Intelligence Agency, "identified a group of cars and trucks fleeing"
Kabul "as a convoy carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader." The Predator
in question is said to have been equipped with two powerful Hellfire
missiles designed for use against tanks. Neither the CIA nor the
command-and-control suite of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain had authority to
unleash the missiles on Osama bin Laden's accommodating host or to call in
fighter-bombers. This decision was left to General Tommy R. Franks, the
CENTCOM commander, who, upon being informed of the situation, consulted his
Judge Advocate General and, on this lawyer's advice, opted not to attack.
When he learned of this decision, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is
said to have kicked in a door or two.
Years ago, Seymour Hersh scored a journalistic coup when he broke the story
of the Mylai Massacre. Since that time, however, his record has been spotty.
He has reported many an event that seems never to have transpired. His motto
seems to have been the directive issued by the editor in Evelyn Waugh's
novel Scoop: "If there is no news, send rumors instead." One cannot, without
further confirmation, be certain that General Franks is guilty as charged.
The story does, however, ring true. And if it is true, it is arguably
symptomatic of larger problems that the Bush administration is going to have
to confront if it is not to make a hash of the current war - for my friend's
remark is on the mark: Peacetime armies are not breeding grounds for
warriors. In fact, at the start of every war of any significance, those in
charge quickly learn that the prewar officer corps that they have inherited
is mostly made up of bureaucrats: paper-pushers quite capable of handling
logistics, but ill-prepared for leadership on the field of the sword. What
follows in successful armies is a cashiering of incompetents and rapid
promotion from within the ranks. Napoleon understood the principle: in the
backpack of every private, there really has to be a marshal's baton.
Our situation today is probably worse than the norm - for the Clinton
administration, in its eagerness to promote the integration of women into
the armed services, did everything within its power to purge the Army, Navy,
and Air Force of warriors and to promote time-servers. One cannot imagine
George Patton or anyone remotely like him tolerating sensitivity training.
The fact, if it is a fact, that General Franks consulted his Judge Advocate
General as to the propriety or our trying to kill Mullah Omar is a sign that
the man in charge of the conflict in Afghanistan was far more interested in
covering his keister than in winning the war. In a genuine conflict, no
warrior would bother consulting a lawyer. He would do what needed doing and
leave it to the lawyers to invent a justification when the real work was
done. If Seymour Hersh's report is true, it is a very bad sign that General
Franks was not immediately relieved of his command.
A case along similar lines can be made concerning the CIA, the FBI, and the
Department of Justice. There is no point at this late date in rehearsing
once more the scale and scope of our intelligence failures in recent years.
It suffices to say that those responsible for our security willfully ignored
a great deal of evidence and treated the World Trade Center bombing in 1993
and the subsequent assaults on our troops at the Khobar Towers in Saudi
Arabia, on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and on the U.S.S. Cole in
Yemen as ordinary criminal matters to be dealt with in a court of law rather
than as part and parcel of a genuine war against the United States. When the
Sudan was willing to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration
declined the offer for fear that the Department of Justice could not make an
adequate case against him in court. No one appears to have noted that bin
Laden and his supporters had declared war on the United States and that they
should simply be killed.
The feckless legalism underpinning our past failures persists. In the first
few days after the discovery of anthrax spores in the offices of American
Media, Inc. in Florida - indeed, in the first few days after the discovery
of anthrax spores at NBC in New York - the FBI played down the suspicion,
widespread among the general public, that these attacks were the work of
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. It was by then public knowledge that bin
Laden's associates in Afghanistan had experimented with chemical and
biological weapons, and it was known that a number of those involved in the
assault on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11th had
shown an interest in cropdusters. We were, nonetheless, solemnly told over
and over again by officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice that
there was no reason to link the anthrax attacks with Osama bin Laden - which
is to say, that they had no evidence as yet that would stand up in court.
Such pronouncements did not inspire confidence in the competence of those
entrusted with our national security.
If the Bush administration is serious in its desire to root out the
terrorists, it will have to comb through the military and intelligence
bureaucracy that it has inherited and even look outside its ranks in search
of men who have the right temperament, in search of those intent on victory
and in no way squeamish about the means by which they achieve it. If the
Bush administration really is serious, it will have to shunt aside a great
many of the timid survivors of the Clinton purge. First, however, our
leaders will have to set our government's lawyers to work at something
useful: such as cleaning latrines.

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get your FREE VeriSign guide to security solutions for your web site: encrypting transactions, securing intranets, and more!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/UnN2wB/m5_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:58 PST