In an interview, General Pace reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were worried that a surge would exhaust our patience without doing enough good to counter that exhaustion:
As for the U.S. troop boost, some on the Joint Chiefs had argued against it in January, in part out of concern that it could not be sustained long enough to have the desired effect and that it would put too much strain on the military.
Early on, I was worried about a surge of troops and expressed my opinion that we needed patience rather than more troops.
The form of the surge lessened my worry that our surge would be pointless.
Yet I worried about the metric for judging success.
Luckily, the surge seems to be working and we have the bonus success in Anbar which is completely unrelated to the surge operations.
The surge of troops is going well. As well as I could have hoped. But our Left has surged their retreat impulses at what may be a greater rate.
Is their will to lose greater than our capacity to win? We shall see.
