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! 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