Gates blasts Nato

Captain Buzzkill said:

I ask you this: Have you ever served in a military capacity? If you haven't then I don't know how to explain the world that I come from. It sounds cliche and evasive - I realize this.

If you've ever experienced anything like combat, then you'd know that objectivity / rationality goes right out the window once rounds start coming downrange. You survive or die based on your training; there's no time to think, and even if you had the time, it's too loud and too chaotic.

While not all members of the military are professionals, I'd like to say that most of them are, and when I speak of emotional investment, I'm talking about the dedication to the mission that comes from sharing a cold concrete floor with 25 other guys, 39 hour convoys in 105 degree heat, or dragging a buddy behind the cover of a humvee, all the while reassuring him that you'll go find his rifle. When you experience things like this, your resolve to see the mission succeed becomes stronger than if you hadn't. It's not about getting all "Hulk Mad," and killing an entire village of women and children. It's about putting a friend on a medevac helicopter, or shoving a tampon into a bullet hole, and realizing that if any of the carnage or blood is going to be worth it, then you stay and finish the job. If that job is building schools, then you build schools. If that job is securing elections and building relationships with the local civilians, then that's what you do. If that job is patrolling a well known route that the Taliban uses to shuttle personnel and materiel, then that's what you do. But you do it with a hotter fire and a greater sense of dedication.

It's something you have to live through in order to appreciate.

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It's going to be tricky to say this in a constructive way, I think.

The closer you are to the ground, the less you are able to see the big picture. It's not that you see less, it's that your range of seeing is limited. You see around you…you see your friends…you see up close and in your face. I know that everything you posted here is true.

But.

The higher up the chain you go, the more pragmatic you are forced to become. As a company commander, let's say, now you are responsible for multiple tasks, not just one, and although you are still close enough to the ground to consider individuals, you start thinking in terms of squads and platoons. Bn commander? Now you are high enough that you seldom think directly of individuals, unless they are commanders of smaller units or you work with them every day. Your map markers are company size. Bde commander? You probably know, aside from HQ folks, very few of your soldiers. Div Cmdr? It's all about numbers at that point.

It's still intense, but much of it is no longer the in your face kind of shock and awe, but more like incessant stress. Depending on what you are actually doing, it's like managing from spreadsheets, but you never forget what those numbers mean. Your troopers are assets, and no longer people, until you hit the rack and have too much time to think.

It becomes even more pragmatic for the civilian command folks and the planners. What is the job? What does victory actually mean? What are the metrics of success, and how do we achieve goals that will often shift as the facts change? your staff always have several ideas on how to achieve the next goal. How do you choose, when no one has done this thing before, and you have limited information of suspicious quality, often out of date, often conflicting, often forced on you by highers.

Then we have the international coalitions, and each member has functional parameters and rules of engagement forced upon them by their civilian command structures, reflecting the level of risk tolerance each nation is willing to endure.

Getting side tracked a bit here, so I'll cut to the chase:

Every military action is ultimately a political decision, with political metrics, and political goals. The higher up the chain of command, the more political the goals become. The lower one is in the chain of command, the more personal it becomes.

The goal of a company may be to secure this here town. The goal of the President may be to disrupt the regional status quo. One either secures the town or not…the meaning of "success" is clear and easily measured. the measure for success for "disrupting the status guo) is often difficult to measure, and the meaning of "success" is often in dispute.

We are leaving Af/Stan eventually, and the measure of success is open for debate. We did disrupt the ability of AQ to mount international operations, and we did weaken the Taliban sufficiently to basically deneuter them. Those were the two primary goals of the original operation, and to that degree, it was successful. but no matter where you are in the chain, missions change and missions are scrubbed. Decisions are made not tho throw good money after bad. Sometimes the cost isn't worth the prize, and these sorts of decisions are made pragmatically (or should be), and not emotionally.

You know, it's actually rather easy to prove what Buzzkill and DTE were saying about the effectiveness of NATO in Afghanistan. It's been openly talked about. Some partners are rather good, others have been so hampered by the national caveats that their participation is rather lackluster in quite a few ways. Afghanistan went down hill after the US stopped paying attention to it and basically left NATO in charge. *shrug* It's an undeniable fact.

That's not to say, though, that NATO's participation is worthless. Many of them have capabilities the US Military/government does not. The primary one that comes to *my* mind are things like the Carbinieri or Guarda Civil.