by Joe Snyder
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No one in Washington, including those in the planning and conduct of present and of future wars, knows exactly what is in store for America. At the beginning of the conflict in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a reporter how long the war might last. He replied that he didn’t know because he could not predict how the enemy would respond.
Nothing much has changed. No one seems to have an answer to the situation there. President Bush already declared the "war" over, but that conflict has now degenerated into "guerilla warfare’ for which we had no real planning. Asking when this conflict will end, and how much it will cost, is like asking President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when the Civil War would be concluded. Nobody in Washington has an answer.
Our top military commanders today are learning that all they can be sure of is that the war will end, sometime, and that the war they are fighting is hardly the war they expected to fight when ordered to do so. It does seem, however, the planners of this adventure missed a lot of possible situations and developments that have delayed victory, and, in the meantime, cost an unfortunate number of deaths and casualties.
America did not benefit in any way from the far-too-soon end of the exercise in Afghanistan; indeed, this situation worsens every day. Carl Von Clausewitz, the father of modern military tactics, predicted such situations because the friction of war creates an ever-widening gap between planning a war and the reality of the actual conflict. As a mere student of war, I am in no position to second guess the planners except to say it is now obvious they missed some things in planning this war.
War planners must plan for the worst. I know of no general who was ever blamed for winning a war with too many troops. Today America has soldiers stationed in a variety of nations around the world whose names few Americans can even locate on a map, much less spell. This administration, and this Pentagon staff, have guessed wrongly on expected developments which can lead to disaster. Anyone who has been in service knows nearly everything gets all-fouled-up and over budget.
A big worry for the public is, or ought to be, that the services have not increased the size of its forces to any measurable degree since the war began. They have reached a bit into the National Guard and Reserves. This has worked for the first two years of this war but it will not work much longer. Many in the Reserves and National Guard, after two years on active duty and anxious to return to civilian life, will be leaving the active duty force as quickly as they can. This is not World War II. Patriotism is not running very high.
Al Qaeda understands America cannot usually decline protecting somebody or anybody, so they plan to keep us busy. No one can predict the numbers of nations in which U.S. troops will be deployed the next two years. The public appears not to be overly concerned, but they should be. While Americans are fighting and dying in a foreign lands (again) the folks in The Pentagon try to pretend our forces are on maneuvers in Tennessee.