Originally Posted by
Skroe
The gap is this large because civilian leaders of both parties - Not the military, which did everything that was asked of them - completely and utterly lost the War on Terror years ago, through epic mismanagement, stunning incompetence, corruption and compromise. But because Civilian leadership in the United States is so weak, we have not yet a President or a Congress to take ownership of the fact that America has now lost at least two wars in the last fifty years. So they keep sending 10,000 troops to Afghanistan, 17 years later.... for what reason exactly? To somehow redefine "not visibly losing" as "winning"?
The US should have ground Al Qaeda to the dust and been out of Afghanistan by 2004. In that world, the Civilian Military gap is much narrower. But in this one, because Republicans cut taxes while going to war, instead of expanding the US Army to be 800,000 strong like was needed, it kept it at 560,000 and asked two, three, four deployments out of troops. And that was followed by Barack Obama and the Democrats, which treats military service like an affliction, and tried to downscale the military even further, while expanding its missions.
You want that civilian-military gap fixed? This is how you fix it. You expand the US military by hundreds of thousands of troops and hundreds of ships, fighters and vehicles. A $150-$250 billion expansion. You raise taxes, significantly, to pay for it. And then you decide to commit big to Afghanistan and do it right, or cut your loses and get out. Getting big means 30 years with 300,000 troops there at a time.
The US military-civilian divide's origin is rather plain: the only people to take the War on Terror seriously was the US Military. American civilians didn't. Politicians didn't. Without the whole team playing, of course the game was blown.
And you know what the absolute best part is? This country is so epically stupid about this shit, that it KNEW all this stuff right after 9/11. I'm old enough to remember that political talk, about "doing it right", "lessons from Vietnam", watching out for an open ended commitment and civilian-military divide. None of this was a surprise. We knew how this could go down if we made the wrong choice.
And nationally, we made the wrong choices anyway. What does that say about us as a people?