Nucking Futs

A reason why the insurgents have been able to stay a step ahead of American and other coalition troops is that they learn faster from their mistakes. This is to say that they adapt their tactics while coalition troops constantly rotate in fresh soldiers who have to learn the counterinsurgency ropes pretty much from scratch.

If the Pentagon were operated like a successful business it would have all kinds of methods for collecting useful ideas from the people on the front line, who do the work and take the risks.

If the Pentagon were operated like a successful business, people could quit whenever they wanted.

Some things should not be run like a business and the obsession with applying business practices to government is way overboard. Indeed, a lot of the problems in Iraq may be directly attributable to the very nature of private contractors and this government’s obsession with them.

We’re still using as our primary infantry rifle a jam-prone, overly complicated 40+-year old design that fires a cartridge (a “hot” version of the 223 Remington varmit round, the 5.56 NATO) originally designed for dispatching gophers. Time and again, our primary infantry weapon fails to stop the enemy, to the point that those shot can absorb multiple rounds and still retain the capability to fire back. REad Michael Yon’s dispatch Gatesof Fire for a graphic account where an insurgent takes four rounds and is then able to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

If we can’t even get the military brass to get the job done on a well known decades-old issue that affects virtually everyone in uniform, what chance do you think there is that they can adopt isolated and quirky (even if effective) battlefield adaptations?

Our Pentagon often moves ploddingly slow, and if nothing else, Rusmfeld, for all his faults, was trying to change this culture. I have little faith that installing a realist like Robert Gates in the role of Sec Def will make this or similar issues any better.