Winning Battles and Losing Wars
Digby has a fine piece, Primed For McCain, that covers the delusional thinking that passes for gravitas these days.
First of all, even if they could be found, and extra 100,000 troops in Iraq are too few at this point to even provide security, much less achieve anything that looks like a victory. If they had been there at the beginning to provide security for the people and prevent the looting of the ammo dumps, things might have worked out, but at this point they would just provide more targets.
While McCain, and other veterans in Congress, have been watching, Rumsfeld has been transforming the US military into a force that can win every battle, but is totally incapable of winning a war.
By paring the military down to units that only have one function, combat, and outsourcing all of the support functions, he has created a force that cannot sustain itself in the field for any extended period of time, and is totally incapable of security and peacekeeping missions.
Rumsfeld demanded planning for the Iraq invasion that was predicated on beating the Iraqi army, but did not even plan for a surrender, much less an occupation.
The current US military is all tactics and no strategy. It is the equivalent of a criminal justice system consisting of only SWAT teams: they can catch the criminals, but have no plan to deal with them after the capture.
