BrendenF11
07-09-2012, 11:38 PM
I truely do. I see no point sending thousands upong thousands of troops in a country to fight, it is not an applicable solution to the problem that America faces now. Send those thousands of troops into a country creates more mayhem in a long term sense, than conducting covert operations and drone strikes to take out those that matter.
The simple fact of any kind of warfare is that without any kind of command and control, or logistical component, larger meaningful operations are not valid. Look at how terrorist organizations operate. Typically there are a few head honchos, they are the brains of the operation, they function as the source of money, command, and leadership to tell people where they need to be and when they need to be there.
The thing about the honchos is that they do also tend to have a certain way of doing things, and in a terrorist organization the way of doing things is extemely important. They will seperate from each other when one leader is killed, fight amongst themselves, and eliminate any threat to their actual enemies. They will instead create a threat to themselves, fight it out, then they will have to reorganize and adopt to who ever wons mentality.
So anywho here is a decent article on the issue.
http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/07/09/obama-kill-lists-and-jure-belli/?comp=1198882887570&rank=2
The latest issue of Esquire has an interesting article — a polemic, really — by Tom Junod about how President Obama has prosecuted the surgical portion of the war. Here’s an excerpt:
You are not the first president with the power to kill individuals. You are, however, the first president to exercise it on a mass scale. You inherited the power from George W. Bush as one of several responses to terrorism. You will pass it on to your successor as the only response, as well as an exemplar of principle. Your administration has devoted far more time and energy to telling the story of targeted killing than it has to telling the story of any of your domestic policies, including health care. It is as though you realize that more than any of your policies, the Lethal Presidency will be your legacy.
Hold it. Isn’t this the guy who was elected as the national social consciousness pendulum was swinging away from the perceived arrogance of the Bush 43 years? Weren’t we going to be conducting foreign policy with an eye on international law and the notion that it’s a small world after all?
So when Obama the Candidate said he intended to close Guantanamo Bay what he meant wasn’t that it denied due process or set the wrong tone to the world; he meant that we wouldn’t need it because we weren’t taking any prisoners on his watch.
Now I’m not a “kill ‘em all let God sort it out” kind of guy by any means, but I have to say this assertion is pretty ironic considering the charges regarding Obama’s lack of qualifications in his role as commander-in-chief coming into the job a few years ago. Doesn’t seem exactly “soft on terror,” does it?
In the face of the mission creep of Afghan nation building and the hit-or-miss elements of our COIN strategy, one would have to allow that the way we’ve worked our way up and down the high value target list has been the most successful part of the war(s). (Remember the deck of cards assignments going into the invasion of Iraq? That was pure branding genius.) Hell, the way we’ve repeatedly dealt with “the number two man at al Qaeda” alone has been an unqualified smash, not to mention OBL himself. Sure, there has been some collateral damage, but for the most part, SOCOM assets and the CIA have bad guy elimination down to a science, literally.
We could bring up the absence of protests by Democratic lawmakers and imagine what the response might have been if a similar body of facts presented themselves during W’s time in the White House, but let’s avoid that rabbit hole here.
Read Junod’s piece and then riddle me this, erudite readers of LoD: Should we be concerned about the unintended consequences of such a strategy or is taking no prisoners nothing but a good tactic that has made America safer?
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/07/09/obama-kill-lists-and-jure-belli/#ixzz20Bdsw2jq
The simple fact of any kind of warfare is that without any kind of command and control, or logistical component, larger meaningful operations are not valid. Look at how terrorist organizations operate. Typically there are a few head honchos, they are the brains of the operation, they function as the source of money, command, and leadership to tell people where they need to be and when they need to be there.
The thing about the honchos is that they do also tend to have a certain way of doing things, and in a terrorist organization the way of doing things is extemely important. They will seperate from each other when one leader is killed, fight amongst themselves, and eliminate any threat to their actual enemies. They will instead create a threat to themselves, fight it out, then they will have to reorganize and adopt to who ever wons mentality.
So anywho here is a decent article on the issue.
http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/07/09/obama-kill-lists-and-jure-belli/?comp=1198882887570&rank=2
The latest issue of Esquire has an interesting article — a polemic, really — by Tom Junod about how President Obama has prosecuted the surgical portion of the war. Here’s an excerpt:
You are not the first president with the power to kill individuals. You are, however, the first president to exercise it on a mass scale. You inherited the power from George W. Bush as one of several responses to terrorism. You will pass it on to your successor as the only response, as well as an exemplar of principle. Your administration has devoted far more time and energy to telling the story of targeted killing than it has to telling the story of any of your domestic policies, including health care. It is as though you realize that more than any of your policies, the Lethal Presidency will be your legacy.
Hold it. Isn’t this the guy who was elected as the national social consciousness pendulum was swinging away from the perceived arrogance of the Bush 43 years? Weren’t we going to be conducting foreign policy with an eye on international law and the notion that it’s a small world after all?
So when Obama the Candidate said he intended to close Guantanamo Bay what he meant wasn’t that it denied due process or set the wrong tone to the world; he meant that we wouldn’t need it because we weren’t taking any prisoners on his watch.
Now I’m not a “kill ‘em all let God sort it out” kind of guy by any means, but I have to say this assertion is pretty ironic considering the charges regarding Obama’s lack of qualifications in his role as commander-in-chief coming into the job a few years ago. Doesn’t seem exactly “soft on terror,” does it?
In the face of the mission creep of Afghan nation building and the hit-or-miss elements of our COIN strategy, one would have to allow that the way we’ve worked our way up and down the high value target list has been the most successful part of the war(s). (Remember the deck of cards assignments going into the invasion of Iraq? That was pure branding genius.) Hell, the way we’ve repeatedly dealt with “the number two man at al Qaeda” alone has been an unqualified smash, not to mention OBL himself. Sure, there has been some collateral damage, but for the most part, SOCOM assets and the CIA have bad guy elimination down to a science, literally.
We could bring up the absence of protests by Democratic lawmakers and imagine what the response might have been if a similar body of facts presented themselves during W’s time in the White House, but let’s avoid that rabbit hole here.
Read Junod’s piece and then riddle me this, erudite readers of LoD: Should we be concerned about the unintended consequences of such a strategy or is taking no prisoners nothing but a good tactic that has made America safer?
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/07/09/obama-kill-lists-and-jure-belli/#ixzz20Bdsw2jq