Getting His News from the MSM

Normally when mistakes are this concentrated you need to mix it with 3 cans of water to make it palatable. Helprin starts out reasonably enough, stating that for the twenty years prior to 9-11 we failed to respond adequately to Islamic terror.

I grant him that, though if you go back to 1981 you have to remember that we still had the Soviet Union to worry about and any other threat really was secondary to dealing with that nuclear-armed despotism that loomed over Europe. Then, coping with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union itself to make sure the Soviet empire did not pull the temple down on all of us in its death throes was kind of important.

So really, I'd only give us real grief since the mid-1990s for not responding to the only major threat apparent. But still, whether the inattention was justified or not, it is hard to argue given 9-11 that we did fail to respond in a matter to defeat the enemy before we were hit hard.

But then Helprin just loses me completely, arguing a whole series of purported mistakes since 9-11 that he says are courting strategic error. When I read articles like this by learned authors, I wonder if I am totally closed minded. I look at what he writes and think how can he possibly interpret the information he has to come to these conclusions?

He says we've held back from our troops the armor, and basic equipment they need to win? Not enough armored vehicles, body armor, and other staples of battle, he says.

Our troops are the best equipped troops in the history of warfare. Period. Our tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are well armored and the troops operating them well trained. Our military has put personal body armor on troops that is a marvel and we've improved it during the war. Any shortages are from the upgrading of the armor. Sorry we can't snap our fingers and produce two million sets in a week. If the issue is armor for Humvees, the situation in Iraq is unique to war thus far. No other war has witnessed this use of IEDs. Remember that after Baghdad fell, critics of the military urged our troops out of our armor and into soft caps to police the Iraqis. Nobody anticipated the IEDs. The real story is our speed of armoring these vehicles and our trucks. This speed is part of the general military's rapid fielding of new equipment as troops discover equipment that works. Soldiers are buying equipment because they are educated, well paid, and have access to high quality civilian gear. The military is quickly adopting this material and modifying military gear based on soldier input.

And he belittles the speed of capturing Baghdad in three weeks.

Give me strength. After all the talk of quagmire when we paused to refuel and rearm during the major sandstorm after four days of rapid advance, and after all the talk of a Stalingrad on the Tigris that we'd face in Baghdad, we bounced the city and took it with few casualties and after only three weeks. This was no minor accomplishment and the amazing ability to diminish what we did simply because we did it without apparently breaking a sweat ignores the decades of training that led to the Army and Marine Corps at that point in time that smashed the enemy.

He says we were plodding and should have used speed to demoralize the Iraqi defenders. He claims this failure to shock and awe the enemy caused the insurgency to be born.

Again, the speed of advance was incredible. And the Iraqi army largely dissolved. The Republican Guards fought but were annihiliated on the outskirts of Baghdad and were so demoraloized that they did not fall back into the cities for a last stand. Neither did the Special Republican Guards who were supposed to die to the last man defending the city. How much of their residual morale does Helprin think was there to be destroyed? As for the insurgency, it was planned before the war apparently and fed by ample money and jihadis and ammunition already in the country in large numbers. Perhaps speeding up the long march to H-Hour would have aided this and I suspect it would have; but once the shooting started, arguing that had we appeared in Baghdad on day one would have short circuited the insurgency is madness.

He then says we failed to deploy a 10:1 ratio of troops to insurgents to suppress the insurgency.

First, I've read the ratio is an old method of measuring strength and not used anymore. Troop density per population is better. And as I've said countless times I think our troop density is sufficient to win. Funny enough, if you use the ratio we look even better. 190,000 Iraqis; 140,000 Americans; 20,000+ Coalition; 20,000 private security; plus Kurdish and Shia militias, and you have quite a force. I have never heard anybody claim that there are more than 25,000 insurgents and that is the extreme high end. Given the attacks per day, fewer than 10,000 seems far more likely.

He says we discarded too much military power at the end of the Cold War.

Perhaps. But our Navy and Air Force are unchallenged in their realms so we'd be bouncing the rubble. Should our Army have remained larger? Yeah, I agree. Ten divisions with 33 brigades was too small. And the force structure was 40,000 too low to man what we had. But now we are going up to 43 brigades and may go to 48. In the end, I guess it depends on who you see as our enemies. We've had sufficient force to destroy our enemies thus far.

He says we aren't embracing innovation.

Hogwash. Rapid Fielding Initiative. The Future Force and Future Combat Systems. UAVs. New long-range guns. All electric vehicles. New body armor. Blue Force Tracker. GPS. Troops on horseback. Real-time intelligence. IED detectors. Field armor. Balloons for surveillance. Sniper direction detectors. My God, is anything short of Star Trek phasers too plodding for this guy?

He says we are reshaping our military into a small-wars, peace-keeping and counter-insurgency force that could not defeat the Chinese. He says we are abandoning heavy forces and have cut the fleet to half the size from under President Reagan.

Unless Helprin thinks we need 90 divisions to invade and conquer China (and where is he going to get the 10:1 ratio for that counter-insurgency!) his comments can't apply to the Army which wouldn't be large enough to fight China on the continent if it was tripled in size. Our heavy forces are still the best in the world and even if we abandon them we will have Abrams for three more decades. I think the Iraq War counter-insurgency has retaught the Pentagon the value of armor. I think we will retain our protection superiority one way or the other. I see no evidence that we are abandoning mobile warfare for light infantry for small wars. As to the fleet being half the siz of the late 1980s fleet. Well yes. But our "destroyers" are nearly as large as World War II heavy cruisers. These are capital ships and our fleet is far more capable than it was fifteen years ago. And what navy can oppose us now? Why break the bank building a fleet to bounce the rubble? Talk about our opponents now and in the future--not our past enemies. How relevant is it that we once sized our fleet for the Soviet fleet?

He says that by moving from Europe and the Western Pacific to Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, we are creating "a long and open alley through which China will run." This will tie us down, he says. We haven't done anything to counter China's rising power, he asserts.

I'd like to keep more ground power in Europe as a launching pad to the arc of crisis from North Africa to Central Asia, but the fact is that this move and the wihdrawal of a brigade from South Korea concentrates our power in CONUS and does not disperse it. The small forces we are spreading around the world are not tied down so much as they are preparing the way to receive our forces based in CONUS. I have no idea what the Heck Helprin is talking about when he says there is a long alley the Chinese will run down. Truly baffling. Indeed, the Chinese seem to think we have them surrounded by our presnece in Central Asia. The Chinese seem to want to enter Africa and the Middle East. Failing to compete with China in these areas would seem to risk letting China run freely. And as we build up in Central Asia, bolster military ties with India, open relations with Vietnam, sell arms to Taiwan, strengthen our military alliance with Japan, keep troops in South Korea, pressure Europe and Israel to limit arms sales to Peking, just how are we failing to counter China's rising power? Is Heprin totally divorced from reality?

And the war in Iraq was poorly planned and executed from the beginning, he says.

We won the major combat operations in three weeks and in the 2+ years we've fought the insurgents we've provided a shield behind which the new Iraq is being built: parliament, constitution, government, security forces. The insurgents are clearly losing and in a relatively short time the Iraqis will be able to stand on their own. Asumptions failed as they do in all wars and we made mistakes as in all wars, but we've reacted well and the bottom line is we are winning. This is getting to be a tiresome whining piece.

Helprin finishes up by noting inadequacies in homeland defense and disease preparedness for a potential pandemic. I guess I won't hammer him too much on these for I lack the perspective to judge. Sure, we can do more. And should. But I doubt there is a lot that a free society can do to keep out terrorists. In the end we need to go out and kill them and suppress the urge to become a terrorsit, and capability of supporting those terrorists. And bugs, too, can't be screened out with better metal detectors. If China doesn't provide information about viruses mutating there in a timely fashion, our ability to stop a pandemic is quite limited. But again, I can't argue that we could and should do more.

But the rest of his piece on strategic error is just plain wrong. So wrong that I find it hard to believe he could conclude these things when my judgment is so different. But if he draws his conclusions by reading the MSM, who can fault him too much?