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Thanks tp Pappy at the O Club for the heads-up on this story about Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
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"This
show of organizational dynamism points to a ground truth: despite the
awful toll of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the near-breaking
of the Army through the strain on soldiers and their families because
of long and dangerous deployments, American ground troops are emerging
nearly a decade after 9/11 as a force that is even more
organizationally and intellectually formidable than it was after the
Berlin Wall collapsed, when the United States was the lone superpower.
Army and Marine Corps company commanders, for example, can lead in a
conventional fight and also bring order to chaotic tribal and ethnic
messes, all while they communicate effectively up the bureaucratic
chain (a skill they began to hone before 9/11, in the Balkans). And
these officers have mastered what is, in fact, the colonial technique
of partnering with indigenous forces molded in their own image."
The inability of the West to come up with an comprehensive military,
political and economic solution to the challenge of failed states has
been partly masked by the acquisition of those skills within the
military through experience. Rather than consciously building a
combined capabilities team from different parts of society, the nation
instead acquired a military staffed with soldier-diplomats and amateur
nation builders while they weren’t looking. ... [Worth Reading]
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