Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Obama and the PentagonAndrew Bacevich's article of today at The New Republic website, Civilian Control? Surely, You Jest. 08/18/2010, is a kind of update of the essay he published in 2007 from which I quoted yesterday. That essay describes a series of incidents since the end of the Second World War in which military leaders have asserted their preferences against those of the civilian leadership through bureaucratic maneuvers and politics. His point is that while the legal and formal reality of civilian control of the military prevails in the US, in practice its content is severely mitigated in a variety of ways. In the New Republic piece, he takes the story up to today:A more recent example occurred just a year ago. With President Obama agonizing over what to do about Afghanistan, The Washington Post offered for general consumption the military’s preferred approach, the so-called McChrystal Plan. Devised by General Stanley McChrystal, who had been appointed by Obama to command allied forces in Afghanistan, the plan called for a surge of U.S. troops and the full-fledged application of counterinsurgency doctrine—an approach that necessarily implied a much longer and more costly war.Tags: andrew bacevich, us military | +Save/Share | | |
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