donald rumsfeld

Before we start a new war with ISIS, let’s remember how we stumbled into the last two

By / 18 Comments / 21 August 2014

Summary: As we gear up for new wars in Syria and Africa, and rejoining old wars in Iraq, let’s a pause to think. Success will depend on learning from our failures since 9-11. Our greatest failures have been our initial failures: seeing the situation incorrectly and beginning before we have accurate information about our foe. …

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Bin Laden killed

About the strategic significance of bin Laden’s execution, and the road not taken

By / 1 Comment / 18 January 2018

Summary:  The capture and execution of bin Laden was a powerful act of grand strategy.  Did it advance or damage our national interests?  There was an alternative to his execution, another of the roads not taken by America since 9-11.  Bin Laden borrowed from the ending of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor. We could have borrowed the ending …

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America’s broken OODA loop in action: a swarming attack by ankle-biters in our intelligentsia

By / Leave a Comment / 9 February 2015

Summary:  It’s fun to watch narratives form in the media, such as the one we examine today.  Often mindlessly wrong, but each probably fills some need in our collective psyche.  Unfortunately this embrace of nonsensical narratives is part of our growing inability to clearly see the world — which is rapidly weakening America.  Observation is the first step in the OODA …

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Troops without proper equipment in 2004, troops without proper equipment in 2009 – where’s the outrage?

By / 3 Comments / 19 May 2009

In our 8th year of war, a war without apparent purpose or an obvious endpoint, we repeat the same mistakes — again, and again.  After eight years of war (longer than WWII) perhaps our trillion-dollar military should have gotten better at this.  Esp since the numbers deployed in Afghanistan are so small compared to our invasion of Iraq.  …

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What should we do in Iraq?

By / Leave a Comment / 2 June 2013

Summary:  This is part 2 in a series looking at the Iraq War. Advice from past to the present. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. — Advice from Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith in a letter to President Kennedy, dated 2 March 1962, printed in Galbraith’s Ambassador’s …

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