Quotulatiousness

August 28, 2012

What can Caesar’s Gallic War commentary tell us about Afghanistan?

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:10

According to this reading, lots and lots:

I finished Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War this weekend […] and a few things struck me:

a. The successful Roman counterinsurgency campaign in Gaul took eight years.

b. The enemies against which Rome fought were not a unitary actor, and neither were Rome’s allies.

c. Rome’s allies one summer were often Rome’s enemies by winter. And visa versa.

But the two things that made the biggest impression on me were the following:

d. Caesar was the commander for eight full years, and he enjoyed similar continuity among his subordinate commanders.

e. Caesar very rarely sent green units into the offensive. By the fourth and fifth year of the campaign, he is still making those legions which were the last to be raised in Italy responsible for guarding the freaking baggage. He relies over and over again on those legions — most especially the Tenth — that have proven themselves in combat in Gaul.

With Caesar’s commentaries in mind, I read Doug Ollivant’s lament about Gen. Joe Dunford. Gen. Dunford will be the fifteenth commander of NATO-ISAF in eleven years of combat in Afghanistan and the ninth U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Each of his subordinate commanders have rotated on an annual basis. Gen. Dunford — who is, by all accounts, an excellent officer and highly respected by his peers — has never served in Afghanistan.

The cultures, politics, tribes and peoples of Afghanistan are at least as complex as those of ancient Gaul, yet we Americans are so arrogant to think that we can send officers there with no experience and, owing to our superior knowledge of combat operations, watch them succeed. We will then send units which have never deployed to Afghanistan to partner with Afghan forces and wonder why they do not get along.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

August 27, 2009

QotD: Taliban propaganda, as abetted by the mainstream media

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Well, surprise, surprise: yesterday’s VBIED attack in the city of Kandahar killed at least 41, and wounded over 80 more people. All of them were civilians. Every single one.

And yet still, in the AP piece above, you read the phrase “Taliban spokesmen were not immediately available for comment…” What if these lying sacks of shit had been available for comment, folks? Would we have been reading their misinformation in black and white, juxtaposed credibly against BGen Tremblay’s words in a pathetic bow to “balanced reporting” — like somehow both should be weighed equally? You bet we would.

I’m tired of it. I’m sick and tired of our media giving them a soapbox from which to proclaim what is clearly, plainly, and obviously pure propaganda designed to attack our will as part of a well planned and executed information operations campaign. I’m tired of our journalists willfully ignoring the fact that they’re not just observing the war, they’re affecting it with their reporting. I’m bone-tired of them refusing to take steps to ensure their powerful voice isn’t used against the very system of government that allows them such unfettered speech in the first place.

Damian “Babbling” Brooks, Real propaganda”, The Torch, 2009-08-26

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