Let's get this straight right away: I never served in the military. I've been on a military base once or twice in my lifetime. That's it. What I know about the military I've gleaned from reading and talking with military personnel.
That being said, what this administration does regarding military matters is absolutely ridiculous. In fact, were it not for the fact that most of the people doing it aren't in the military, there would be courts martial virtually every week.
The administration loves to telegraph its punches. I can't believe the Joint Chiefs of Staff are signing off on this. The only reasonable explanation is that the self-proclaimed most-transparent-administration-in-the-history-of-the-nation only feels the need to be transparent when it comes what military actions it's contemplating. This would otherwise be wonderful in a democratic society but certainly not in an age where information can be transmitted in a nanosecond and the opposition thrills when it cuts off the heads of its opponents.
Back in World War II, the Chicago Tribune, fueled either by journalistic partisan zeal (the Trib was and is a conservative news organ), published a report about how naval codebreakers determined that the Japanese were targeting Midway, thereby allowing Admiral Nimitz and his staff to plan the ambush that led to the turning point in the war in the Pacific. Thankfully, not too many Japanese wer lurking in the United States that could transmit back to Tokyo what they could read in the Trib, and even more thankfully, PDA's and the internet were still but a gleam in the eyes of Al Gore (surely, I jest...about Gore, that is), but the damage to our war effort, had that revelation made its way back to our opponents, would have been incalculable. Nowadays, Mr. Obama and his band of merry political partisans thinks first, foremost and only about winning elections and burnishing someone's legacy. By telling our enemies that we're not going to commit ground troops, that drastically alters what responses ISIS must plan. It also makes our job that much more difficult.
But telegraphing our punches is just one act of lunacy. This fantasy of not committing ground troops, while expecting other nations to commit theirs, is not only ridiculous, it's immoral. Our journalists were murdered, not theirs. Why should the Aussies unhesitatingly agree to send their blood and treasure, while we fly well above the danger, safe in the knowledge that ISIS has no anti-aircraft weaponry that can shoot down our planes? What's more, once we bomb the snot out of ISIS, how are we to occupy the land that's stained by the blood of those dead terrorists? Who can make bomb damage assessments accurately from satellite images or planes flying at three or four times the speed of sound from four or five miles above the earth? Did that work well when our intelligence community determined Iraq had WMD's?
I didn't go to Harvard, but I know a thing or two more about military actions than this President does. Sure, he has access to more militarily intelligent people than I do, but he disregards their advice. Besides showing contempt for the life's work these men and women have put in, it's darned foolish to endanger the men and women on the firing lines by supposing that he knows better than the people who have dedicated their lives to protecting this country.
Occupying ground taken is what the army and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps does. Bombing ISIS back to the stone age just means that another radical group will fill the vacuum left by their deaths. When we pulled out of Iraq, that very thing happened.
When will this President learn to put reality over politics?
(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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