Thursday, August 21, 2008
US Security Pt 1
The Russo-Georgian War has brought to light the inability of the United States to respond with effective amounts of ground troops to any new situations in the world; the US Air Force and Navy are capable of putting high amounts of destructive power on any given point on earth, but having that power available is the equivalent of the United States only having a hammer in its military toolbox. I want to make it clear that I am not stating that the United States should have responded with military force to Russian operations in Georgia. However, if it would have been the best decision to make, the country would not have been able to do so; its forces are fully committed elsewhere. This would just be an unfortunate happenstance if the US had been forced into fighting two wars simultaneously prior to the outbreak of a third crisis, but this is not what happened. It became clear on 11 September 2001 that the US had neglected dismantling the Al Qaeda organization, and the government responded with an aggressive campaign against them. This seemed like a partial solution to the problem at the time (addressing only the military aspect of the problem), but has generally succeeded in disorganizing Al Qaeda and rendering it internationally ineffective. However, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq for reasons which are still unclear. Regardless of what those reasons really were, it is clear in retrospect that the war was entirely unnecessary. The idea of fighting an unnecessary war should be strategically repugnant to an American; our foreign policy is supposedly based on defensive military action, and should be so in actuality for the very practical reason that if one country invades another country about which the United States has made a public declaration of defense, it is always wise to have sufficient forces available to persuade the invading army to return to its home country. This is stated generically for a reason; the whethers of military response to the Russo-Georgian War will be discussed in a subsequent post.
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2 comments:
Hey Travis, nice blog. Good first post. In total agreement. However, I think the policy since the WWII has been to maintain the ability to fight in 3 theaters of war at any given time. Regardless of the wisdom of fighting in Iraq, America shouldn't be having problems of over-stretch and serious defecit spending. I'm not sure why, but my suspicion is that when Clinton substantially decreased defense spending to balance his budget, that policy was abandoned as just another Cold War relic. Maybe it should be reconsidered?
-Tim Azevedo
Hey, Travis,
Glad to see you're writing about policy; I expect to see some good insight coming from here.
One thing you mentioned about the Iraq war was that it was unnecessary. I have not stayed as informed about the totality of this operation as perhaps I should have, but much of what I do know is seen through my father's perspective; he works as a research psychologist for a contractor of the DoD and has studied our operations there. The gist of what I've picked up is that aside from the intelligence failures (or misrepresentation) and the strategic misdirection involved, the war in Iraq has been hindered by a basic failure to understand an insurgency opponent. It seems remotely possible in retrospect that had we taken more pains to understand this enemy and have a definitive course of action, the few benefits reaped (like the deposition of Hussein) might have come about much more efficiently. My point is that perhaps policy should redirect more resources to problems like these to augment traditional means of peacekeeping, that our strategical prowess should match our technological capability.
-Ben Leedom
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