daftandbarmy said:
Summed up? If you really care, send in the combat arms....
America’s Misplaced Faith in Bombing Campaigns
Many think of aerial bombardment as a cheap, effective alternative to spilling American blood. They're wrong.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bombs-away/433845/
But, of course, we don't really care much, at all.
The aim is
not to
defeat Da'esh/IS**, the secondary aim is just to
disrupt it, the primary aim is to be being seen to be disrupting it in the hope that, like a magician's parlour trick, the illusion will hide rather shabby reality.
Shabby reality?
Since about 1960s American
grand strategy has been an illusion; the shabby reality has been unnecessary, unconvincing, most frequently aimless "exercises of power." It isn't for lack of a worthy foe. The USSR-China axis was a worthy foe;
hell's bell's, the Warsaw Pact, all by itself, as a tool for Russian expansionism
in Europe, was a worthy foe, but instead of focusing it's military, diplomatic, political and social (soft) power there the Americans allowed the Russians to drag them, often with allies in tow, into all manner of dirty little "hot spots."
In the beginning was the Cuban missile crisis ... and the Russians saw that it, a fake or a deke, worked and so they tried it again and again ... sometimes with good effect, sometimes not. The Americans were also victims of their own
fears. Although President Eisenhower coined the term, it was the amazing Dulles brothers, John Foster an Secretary of State and Allen as head of the CIA, who penned the "domino theory" about which the always conservative Ike was suspicious ...
...but which the Kennedy brothers explicitly cited as the reason for committing real combat power to the Vietnam civil war. It went downhill from there.
It wasn't, really, a big
step stumble from Vietnam to Grenada ...
... and Iraq, and ...
Not everything America did was aimless and unplanned, much less "bad," but American
values are viewed with suspicion, even amongst its friends and America's
strategic vision is, I think generally, seen as being blurred, at best.
And what's next?
Who knows? But I doubt things will get any better ...
I know that I can be accused of nostalgia, but, can anyone honestly say that this guy, who was rumoured to have had presidential ambitions ...
... belongs in the same room in Valhalla as this guy?
Or that she, or even him ...
... can hold a strategic candle to these guys?
Jarrett and Petraeus aren't pygmies compared to Eisenhower and Acheson because they aren't smart and driven, they are and were, however, reflections of the America they serve: one strong, bold and principled, the other equally strong but confused and dull.