Same Shit, Different War

From Armed Forces Journal:

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

You should read the entire article. It's not long.

How do we protect ourselves from the careerists, the "professionals" who know that they will advance by going along with whatever insanity that the leadership demands? How do we reward the men and women who would dare tell the generals that their vaunted strategy is a failure? One of the big lessons after Vietnam was how much it was apparent that the senior officer corps had been drinking the Kool-aid of the "light at the end of the tunnel". There were books by other officers excoriating the officer corps for not telling truth to power. Dereliction of Duty is on the recommended reading list for senior army officers.

And yet, here we are, once again, being lied to by the senior military officers. Even more reprehensible, they may be lying to themselves, as well. For they know that standing up and saying "fucking a, this war is going to hell" won't get them an additional star or a better assignment. While Luftwaffe General Wolfram von Richthofen once observed that Hitler treated the German General Staff as "highly-paid NCOs", it seems to me that there is something in the Army's culture (if not all of the services) whereby the senior officers transform themselves into such.

How can this ever be changed?

(H/T)