Today's Army

I had planned to link to this article and comment on it: US could lose in Iraq due to negative media coverage: commander Yahoo! News/AFP 06/30/06. It's about Col. Jeffrey Snow, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq, worrying about public opinion on the home front, saying things like:

"Our soldiers may be in the crosshairs every day, but it is the American voter who is a real target, and it is the media that carries the message back each day across the airwaves," he said.

"So when the news is not balanced and it's always bad, that clearly leads to negative perceptions back home," he said.

If brigade commanders are saying stuff like this to the press, that's a sign that the officer corps is now in full-bore scapegoating mode.

I was going to say more, but then I saw this post of Digby's commenting on the same piece:

I had always read that after Vietnam the officer corps were inculcated with the lessons of Westmorlandian lies. The military was never again going to get caught up in political spin or be used for domestic political purposes. So why is the military allowing itself to be used like this again? They have no obligation to weigh in against the media or discuss the domestic political situation. They could, and should, try to objectively assess the war and if they believe they are being effective, they can certainly say so. But this kind of comment is purely Rovian Republican political spin that does not serve the military as an institution well. At some point the military is going to look back on this and realize that they went ahead and made exactly the same mistakes they had made thirty years earlier.

Who knew that Digby was such a cock-eyed optimist?

The military determined not to "get caught up in political spin"? Wrong, unfortunately. What our infallible generals and colonels who emulate them seem to have learned from the Vietnam War experience is that if they can just lie and alibi themselves more effectively, everything will be all right.

Steve Gilliard has some darker reflections on the state of things with the Army.


In commenting on the rape-murder investigation over a March 12 incident in the vicinity of Mahmudiya, he writes:

Four cases of unarmed civilians allegedly murdered by US troops, many on multiple tours, with PTSD mostly untreated. Now, there is a cycle of anger being played out. Iraqis are not passive people, they believe in feuds.

And while the 502nd may have been assigned to the 4th ID, the unit is an organic part of the 101st ABN, one of America's elite formation.

So Americans, stressed out and beaten down by continual risk, lashes out. Most soldiers don't, but the breakdown in discipline is there, as well as a growing sense of hopelessness. How many tours before they can quit?

The replacement soldiers , far less able, some borderline criminals, are now replacing those finally leaving the army.

Unless the Bush-Cheney administration can find a way to seriously change course and soon, this situation is going to get worse and worse. Col. Snow may have it all worked out in his mind already how the civilians back home are to blame for the loss of the Iraq War. And it's not entirely false. The civilians who conceived this war and orchestrated the frauds used to justify it and failed miserably to do the minimal responsible planning for the aftermath of the conventional phase of the war do bear a big share of the responsibility.

But this war has also revealed some serious problems with the Army itself in dealing with this kind of war. The breakdown in discipline in the field is a story we've seen glimpses of, glimpses that look very much like the tips of an iceberg. The internal damage to the Army is likely to be one of the biggest stories of this war in the long run. And it's only beginning to be told.

Yes, Bush and Cheney and Rummy and the rest have a lot to answer for. But so do some of our infallible generals.

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