Pent-up-agon: The Future is FID

I’m not sure what to make of this McClatchy article touting the Pentagon’s “new” (yes, once again we have the newest new which is one better than the last new) strategy for “future” (that’s right, they don’t waste time, new wars are brewing already) wars.

Link

WASHINGTON — Nearly a decade after the United States began to focus its military training and equipment purchases almost exclusively on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military strategists are quietly shifting gears, saying that large-scale counterinsurgency efforts cost too much and last too long.

So after ten long years of nothing but abject miserable and total failure to accomplish anything other than death and destruction the Pentagon has figured it cost too much and lasts too long? Gods! We are so lucky to be in the hands of this caliber of genius, I mean otherwise we might be screwed. I shudder to think of it.

But hold on to your, er, hat because more revelations follow! You are so lucky.

Counterinsurgency "is a good way to get out of a situation gone bad," but it's not the best way to use combat forces, said Andrew Exum, a fellow with the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. "I think everyone realizes counterinsurgency is a losing proposition for U.S. combat troops. I can't imagine anyone would opt for this option

Yet even more evidence of the genius behind the genius of the genius who leads us. Oh still my beating heart. What have we been doing for the last ten years? No, I can’t imagine anyone opting for this option either. Thank god for think tanks because without them where would we be? Somewhere else, that’s for sure.

Foreign Internal Defense

Self explanatory, isn’t it? “Foreign Internal Defense”, also known as “FID”, otherwise known as “Fairy Tales In Demand", suggest that in future wars we merely have whichever nation declare war on itself whereupon one half of the nation will kill the other half thus making Americans safer, …somehow.

Many Pentagon strategists think that future counterinsurgencies should involve fewer American ground troops and more military trainers, special forces and airstrikes. Instead of "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here," as former President George W. Bush once defined the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Pentagon thinks it must train local populations to fight local insurgents.

The military calls it "foreign internal defense," although some have a pithier name: counterinsurgency lite.

The new kind of counterinsurgency is "for the indigenous people and a handful of Americans," said Joseph Collins, a professor at the National Defense University, a Pentagon-funded institution that trains officers and civilians.

Thank god Collins is a professor, we are in such good hands. I can’t wait to see FID in action, can you?

Robert Gates, secretary of the fence, another capable, grounded in reality, cat boiling genius, blesses us with the following enlightenment.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recognized the changed thinking in an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

"The United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan and Iraq anytime soon — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire," he wrote. More likely, he said, are "scenarios requiring a familiar tool kit of capabilities, albeit on a smaller scale."

Translation: when we attack Iran we are just going to nuke them forgoing the regime change.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to make of all this Pentagonal soul searching for it seems like a rather oddball article to me. There doesn’t seem to be any reporting other than repeating what these astonishingly stupid jack-asses who somehow aspire to high positions in the government are telling us. I mean why now? Of course the Pentagon is famous for its gourmet propaganda but is this going to convince anyone that we aren’t being led by morons? It sounds like a lot of PR to me.

When it comes down to it this is just more of the same BS we have been hearing for years. It’s always “We’ll be smarter about it this time.” Obama was going to be smarter by making Afghanistan the right war. The Democratic Party was going to be smarter about Iraq than the Bush administration. This time, next time, it’s always the same.

What never gets mentioned in this “dialogue” this paltry “debate” is the monstrous acts that we commit leaving behind an ever widening swath of death and destruction in our terrible wake, this, the most important factor, the moral side of the issue which is never, ever, mentioned in our national narrative. It’s a given that the wars shall march on into eternity, no one questions this, it merely is.