----- Original Message ----- From: Leigh Meyers To: leigh_m ; Newsroom-L Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 8:56 AM Subject: "...an unsettled and suddenly more dangerous world"
I wonder how *THAT* happened?
First: Travus T. Hipp @ www.leighm.net
News: Kyrgyzstan: Democracy on the march becomes mobs on the run, Bobby Fischer released... Accepted for residency in Iceland, Military news: New design tourniquet for US forces... Army enlistments fall short 2nd month... new ad campaign targets parents of HS students, More...
Commentary: The "`Stans" for "Dummies": An Overview Of the Central Asian Situation and Current US Military Involvement in the Region...
Also, A Word from Our Sponsor... ~~~~
"But that doesn't appear to be what Secretary Rumsfeld has in mind. We will go in, teach the army of some faltering nation how to fight better, give it the weapons and leave as quickly as we came. A much better idea for certain, and one that was in the original plans for those old, discredited MAAG groups."
Pentagon returning to '50s-era thinking?
Wed Mar 23,12:08 PM ET
By Joseph L. Galloway, Knight Ridder Newspapers
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-3994
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2270&u=/krwashbureau/20050323/ts_krwashbureau/_bc_galloway_column_wa_1&printer=1 WASHINGTON - The American military's future, at least for the next four years, will be hammered out over the next six months in a massive review of everything from people to equipment to strategies for dealing with an unsettled and suddenly more dangerous world.
The Pentagon (news - web sites) goes through this exercise every four years, on orders from the Congress, and the decisions being made now will shape everything from budgets to expensive new weapons systems to the training of soldiers and the development of leaders.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seeking to stamp his - and the Bush administration's - view on this process, has set four major goals for the military's thinkers and planners to work toward. That still-classified document speaks to how Rumsfeld sees the world of the future.
Influenced heavily by the experience of Sept. 11, 2001, and by the unexpectedly costly war in Iraq (news - web sites), Rumsfeld told the military that the four core issues are:
-Building partnerships with threatened or failing states to defeat terrorism.
-Defending the American homeland by all means, including pre-emptive strikes against terrorists plotting attacks.
-Preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
-Influencing the military choices of rising powers such as China or India.
None of the markers laid down by Rumsfeld speaks to the issue of old-fashioned state-against-state conventional warfare, which signals the beginning of some serious in-fighting over high-dollar contracts for such things as Navy destroyers and big submarines, short-range fighter-bombers and main battle tanks. At the moment, there are two services at war - the Army and the Marine Corps - and two others - the Air Force and the Navy - which are essentially at peace. <...>
He wants a proactive military that can dispatch small teams to teach counter-insurgency techniques to the armies of beleaguered countries and help them survive, and yet is powerful enough to influence the thinking and strategic choices of countries such as Russia and China. <...>
There was a time, even within the memory of Rumsfeld, when the United States put what were called Military Assistance and Advisory Groups (MAAGs) in hotspots around the world to train and arm the armies of faltering nations beset by insurgents, who in those days were often communists or allied with communists.
Beginning in 1950, there was a MAAG in French Indochina, eventually providing more than 70 percent of the cost of the French war against the Viet Minh guerrillas. When the French were driven out in 1954, the American MAAG began advising and supplying the forces of the new nation of South Vietnam.
That adventure ended badly, both for us and for South Vietnam, in 1975. Until recently, the U.S. military avoided other such missions out of fear that we'd become embroiled in civil wars and forced deeper into various swamps. Instead, we've sold faltering nations the arms with which to fight their own battles. <...> L http://www.leighm.net http://www.furl.net/members/leigh_m/rss.xml