Recommended Reading
….In any case, we have an obligation to maintain our units at the highest readiness and to develop the skills and character of our young Marines and Sailors. Like it or not, our services have adopted a culture and a reality of providing some degree of in loco parentis supervision to our juniors. With that comes some “intrusive leadership.” The commentators above, however, cite the blow to the concept of “special trust and confidence” and to the likely effects on morale as servicemembers are increasingly treated as suspects. This is all true, in my book. But it is not so simple as it seems at first glance. This is not a blow to trust and morale solely because it is an imposition. It is seen that way because it is just one more policy doomed to fail because it is based on institutional moral cowardice, risk averse thinking, and is part of a policy portfolio that is reflective of a lack of priorities. I’ll delve into each of these, but the best summation came from an infantry officer friend of mine: “I get weighed once a month so I don’t get fat. I pee in a bottle once a month so I don’t take drugs. Now I’m going to to have to take a breathalyzer on a regular basis so I don’t come to work drunk. Yet, no one is checking to make sure that I’m competent at my job and am not going to get anyone killed.” There is a lot to discuss in this statement, but don’t start sniping it yet. We are going to take a somewhat circuitous route to get back to the breathalyzer issue, but it all ties together.
Milpub(Seydlitz89)- The Big Picture
….Tweaking the tactics on the ground in South Vietnam would have perhaps inflicted higher losses on the North’s invasion force, may have bought the Saigon government a bit more time, but to what purpose? Would this US tactical success have changed the character of South Vietnam’s ruling elite? Would it have made the people in the South willing to die to save the RVN government? Tactics comes down to the implementation of violence to achieve specific and limited goals which supposedly build on one another to create operational and finally strategic success. Violence has it’s uses, and war is essentially organized violence, but it is not going to build a political community. Outstanding tactical virtuosity still would not have translated into a US victory in Vietnam. At this point the tendency of tactical myopia leading to grand tactical speculation becomes clear and the reason for it as well. It allows us to avoid what the real main questions are and what failure actually entails.
Check out Microsoft’s Chronozoom Project– an amazing tool.
Abu Muqawama shoots it out with Hezbollah (literally). Hat tip to Brett at Marine Corps Gazette.
iRevolution –Crisis Mapping Syria: Automated Data Mining and Crowdsourced Human Intelligence
The Arabist –IN TRANSLATION: EGYPT’S CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF CONSENSUS
Registan.net (Christopher Schwartz) –Abai — Strauss on the steppe
That’s it.
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