A different war

While in his latest Atlantic Monthly article about Iraq, “Why Iraq Has No Army”, James Fallows does not expend many words comparing our Iraq experience with a few of our previous military adventures, his comments about these previous experiences caught my eye.

For example, with Vietnam we actually trained some of our people in the Vietnamese language for four to six months. In the house-to-house conflicts of Iraq very, very few of our troops speak the language or have interpreters directly available to them.In World War II our military had Japanese language schools all over the country.

After two-plus years in Iraq we still are having problems supplying our troops with all the equipment they need. One of the major reasons we won WWII was because of our ability to quickly and efficiently supply almost all of the Allied troops.

I know it’s the 21^st century and the age of a volunteer army. But, when my brothers were drafted in WWII, they were gone until the Summer of 1945. Now, we transfer soldiers out after a year or less, no matter what our needs are. (See this post.) This idea of a limited stay violates all the advice of experts in counterterrorism: that the establishment of long term personal relationships is absolutely required to defeat insurgents.

As a child, I was quite aware that this country was at war as were all of my friends, not only because of the news but also because, in our own way, we all sacrificed. I can still recall Bush’s strategy as to what we could do to fight today's war on terrorism: shop.