The Nazi/appeasement analogy

[Preechr]

A good example: Rummy is widely credited for "streamlining" the military, which gives the impression that he woke up one morning with a hangover and a brave new idea, immediately setting out to hack and slash the existing force structure into some ingenious, innovative "army of one." This is hardly the case. He worked a lot of the political angles that allowed major changes to made, but all he represented was the political push behind the culmination of millions of man-hours over decades... tons of other people much more qualified than Rummy have dedicated much of their careers to re-shape the Post-Cold-War military.

As I said before, the world is no longer threatened by the huge scale warfare that ended with the gore and death of WWII. Since the end of the Cold War, we have no more use of the type of soldiers and gear required to fight on that level. Admirals and Generals have commissioned thousands of experts to forcast the threats of the future and what we'll need to meet them. Billions of dollars have been spent in this effort, and the effort is ongoing.

It took the 9/11 attacks to refocus those Admirals and Generals on the real threats of this century. They were still hoping for (and thus paying for the studies that confirmed) a real threat from a "near-peer," like China. You can still hear idiots talking about a red threat, regardless of the fact that the only thing China might possibly mobilize for is our failure to stabilize the oil supply they will be needing in abundance in about ten years. I have said it before: if this is a war for oil on any level, it's not a war for oil for us.

Rummy may have been helpful... instrumental even... in lining up the politics behind the pre-packaged Army of One, a metamorphesis still far from completed btw, but it was hardly his idea. It's still fun to watch disenfranchised military leaders, unfortunately streamlined in some way, bitching about Rummy's single-handed prosecution of the war... as if they don't know better.

This is the way of things. Especially these days, administrations mean next to nothing. The only choices to be made are doing what the experts recommend or doing nothing.