{"id":40756,"date":"2018-11-21T06:47:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-21T11:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40756"},"modified":"2018-11-21T06:48:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T11:48:23","slug":"planet-of-war-still-trapped-in-a-greater-middle-eastern-quagmire-the-u-s-military-prepares-for-global-combat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40756","title":{"rendered":"Planet of War:\u00a0Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Planet of War<\/strong>:\u00a0Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat<\/strong> <\/a><\/h3>\n

American militarism has gone off the rails — and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various<\/a> indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Back in 2008, when I was still a captain newly returned from Iraq and studying at Fort Knox, Kentucky, our training scenarios generally focused on urban combat and what were called security and stabilization missions. We\u2019d plan to assault some notional city center, destroy the enemy fighters there, and then transition to pacification and \u201chumanitarian\u201d operations.<\/p>\n

Of course, no one then asked about the dubious efficacy of \u201cregime change\u201d and \u201cnation building,\u201d the two activities in which our country had been so regularly engaged. That would have been frowned upon. Still, however bloody and wasteful those wars were, they now look like relics from a remarkably simpler time. The U.S. Army knew its mission then (even if it couldn\u2019t accomplish it) and could predict what each of us young officers was about to take another crack at: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

Fast forward eight years — during which this author fruitlessly toiled away in Afghanistan and taught at West Point — and the U.S. military ground presence has significantly decreased in the Greater Middle East, even if its wars there remain \u201cinfinite<\/a>.\u201d The U.S. was still bombing, raiding, and \u201cadvising\u201d away in several<\/a> of those old haunts as I entered the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Nonetheless, when I first became involved in the primary staff officer training course for mid-level careerists there in 2016, it soon became apparent to me that something was indeed changing.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Planet of War:\u00a0Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat American militarism has gone off the rails — and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various indecisive and seemingly unending […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2487,23125,23126,18770,442,522,9414,1343,6463,827,7055,844],"class_list":["post-40756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-afghanistan","tag-american-militarism","tag-counterinsurgency","tag-danny-sjursen","tag-iraq","tag-middle-east","tag-nation-building","tag-regime-change","tag-tom-dispatch","tag-united-states","tag-us-army","tag-us-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40757,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40756\/revisions\/40757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}