See:
http://angriestgeneration.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/youre-decrepit-greedy-narcissistic-luddites-plus-you-have-cooties-play-golf-bake-cookies-and-turn-over-the-country-to-us/
Well, several things here…some of us may not actually remember the worst features of our generation – our determination to shove our parents and their values aside, our lust for power, our disorderly and presumptuous protests, our philistine ignorance of history and culture, our arrogant trashing of the nuclear family and traditional social mores, and our rejection of religious institutions. Would it be presumptuous to say that we are getting our just desserts by having our children feed us some of our own dogfood ? Certainly, we’re not fooling our children – they know where and how much we have cheated them out of what they really deserved: a secure childhood, in a stable and relatively prosperous home, with two loving parents in the house.
Now, it is certainly the prerogative of parents to brace their kids from time to time, and tell them that they’d better shape up if they’re going to amount to anything. And it is just a fact of life, one that our generation tried and did not entirely succeed in flaunting, that in a democratic and meritocratic society, one has to work one’s way up from the bottom.
The simple fact is that even in our broken families, we are all on the same team with our children, and we seek to advance their interests over those of their peers and not outs. So, while my own children are no different – Obamite lemmings like all the rest – the Old Man still has a few moves left to teach them, a few useful contacts left in his Rolodex, a few dollars left in his bank account. I do trust my kids to take better care of me, when I can no longer take care of myself, than I trust my Uncle Sam. But in the meantime, as Rudyard Kipling stated so forcefully in “An Imperial Rescript”
http://pages.prodigy.net/krtq73aa/kipling2.htm
There’s a girl in Jersey City who works on the telephone;
We’re going to hitch our horses and dig for a house of our own,
With gas and water connections, and steam heat through to the top;
And W. Hohenzollern, I guess I shall work till I drop.
And an English delegate thundered:–”The weak an’ the lame be blowed!
I’ve a berth in the Sou’-West workshops, a home in the Wandsworth Road;
And till the ’sociation has footed my buryin’ bill,
I work for the kids an’ the missus. Pull up! I’ll be damned if I will!
—-
Quite so. The response to the “angriest generation” ought to be,
“Your old man was right after all. You want to work forever, you lazy bum ? Well, get on to it, and quit your whining.”
I think our children would like it if that is what we did.
Bill R.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Comments on Andrew Krepinevich’s essay (The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets) on Small Wars Journal
A few days ago, I read Andrew Krepinevich’s essay “The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets" in Foreign Affairs magazine. I've been stewing on it ever since. Well, then I picked up on this piece in the online "Small Wars Journal" blog:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/07/krepinevichs-essay-implies-dis/index.php
and could not help but make the following comments about the whole thing:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most disturbing thing about Krepenevich's Foreign Affairs article is that it purports to be about power projection, but in fact fails to address the hard problems of projecting power even into the Eurasia littoral, much less the Eurasian depth. He identifies problems, then shrugs them off with policy choices that amount to at least a partial strategic withdrawal out of our admittedly
extended positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But how far backwards is too far back ? This tradeoff is not even discussed, much less fairly considered.
I made this point to Mearsheimer at APSA a few years ago - and he didn't get it, either. If you reduce or eliminate your ground force presence in these places, you end up back in 1978 debating the mission and structure of the Rapid Deployment Force. Now we have these Stryker brigades and at least the current C-17 inventory, but deferring the FCS ground vehicles and killing the C-17 production line is hardly the way to improve the strategic mobility of US ground forces. Krepinevich does not even bother to argue the point in his article - he ignores the issue altogether.
And Krepinevich applies the same Alice-in-Wonderland logic to EFV and F-35 as well. These programs, which are based on clearly defined and well understood roles and missions, are attacked as developing "wasting assets". Now, if you pull enough ground forces out of forward bases in Eurasia, you may in fact have to conduct an early entry operation, and you may need to see if the Air Expeditionary Force concept works. And while we certainly do need to concern ourselves with the survivability of our aircraft carrier force - the very backbone our our sea dominance as well as our capability to project forces along the Eurasian littoral - Krepinevich's recommendations do not match his problem statement. If he thinks the F-18 can handle the strike mission job, he needs to come out and say so. You don't get more capability by buying less...I'm reminded of Loren Thompson's brilliant quip, "Smart power begins with hard cash". Boy, I wish I had made that one up.
There is a very dangerous "go-it-alone, we can handle this job" attitude growing up within the special operations and intelligence communities. While resorting to special operations as a leading element of national power can be a decent economy of force strategy in times when the USA needs to conserve its strength and prepare to fight another day, the record of Eisenhower's "New Look" as well as the Reagan Doctrine reveals that the "small war" LIC strategy builds up negative externalities that have to be redeemed in blood and treasure later on. Thus, Eisenhower's abandonment of limited wars made it necessary to fight one in Vietnam a decade later. Reagan's willingness to support insurgencies and unwillingness to engage in counterinsurgency led to the rise of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Clinton tried and failed to destabilize Iraq using the CIA alone, leaving Bush 43 with the task of regime change using a combination of conventional and unconventional means.
Obviously, with very stringent budgetary constraints and declining political support, the Pentagon must use the resources it is given as wisely as possible. But overpromising and overreaching leads to serious structural inequities and programmatic chaos. A more modest and practical long-term vision would be a welcome change on K Street and throughout Washington. We know how this ends when the chickens come home to roost.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/07/krepinevichs-essay-implies-dis/index.php
and could not help but make the following comments about the whole thing:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most disturbing thing about Krepenevich's Foreign Affairs article is that it purports to be about power projection, but in fact fails to address the hard problems of projecting power even into the Eurasia littoral, much less the Eurasian depth. He identifies problems, then shrugs them off with policy choices that amount to at least a partial strategic withdrawal out of our admittedly
extended positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But how far backwards is too far back ? This tradeoff is not even discussed, much less fairly considered.
I made this point to Mearsheimer at APSA a few years ago - and he didn't get it, either. If you reduce or eliminate your ground force presence in these places, you end up back in 1978 debating the mission and structure of the Rapid Deployment Force. Now we have these Stryker brigades and at least the current C-17 inventory, but deferring the FCS ground vehicles and killing the C-17 production line is hardly the way to improve the strategic mobility of US ground forces. Krepinevich does not even bother to argue the point in his article - he ignores the issue altogether.
And Krepinevich applies the same Alice-in-Wonderland logic to EFV and F-35 as well. These programs, which are based on clearly defined and well understood roles and missions, are attacked as developing "wasting assets". Now, if you pull enough ground forces out of forward bases in Eurasia, you may in fact have to conduct an early entry operation, and you may need to see if the Air Expeditionary Force concept works. And while we certainly do need to concern ourselves with the survivability of our aircraft carrier force - the very backbone our our sea dominance as well as our capability to project forces along the Eurasian littoral - Krepinevich's recommendations do not match his problem statement. If he thinks the F-18 can handle the strike mission job, he needs to come out and say so. You don't get more capability by buying less...I'm reminded of Loren Thompson's brilliant quip, "Smart power begins with hard cash". Boy, I wish I had made that one up.
There is a very dangerous "go-it-alone, we can handle this job" attitude growing up within the special operations and intelligence communities. While resorting to special operations as a leading element of national power can be a decent economy of force strategy in times when the USA needs to conserve its strength and prepare to fight another day, the record of Eisenhower's "New Look" as well as the Reagan Doctrine reveals that the "small war" LIC strategy builds up negative externalities that have to be redeemed in blood and treasure later on. Thus, Eisenhower's abandonment of limited wars made it necessary to fight one in Vietnam a decade later. Reagan's willingness to support insurgencies and unwillingness to engage in counterinsurgency led to the rise of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Clinton tried and failed to destabilize Iraq using the CIA alone, leaving Bush 43 with the task of regime change using a combination of conventional and unconventional means.
Obviously, with very stringent budgetary constraints and declining political support, the Pentagon must use the resources it is given as wisely as possible. But overpromising and overreaching leads to serious structural inequities and programmatic chaos. A more modest and practical long-term vision would be a welcome change on K Street and throughout Washington. We know how this ends when the chickens come home to roost.
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