Summarizing the S%$t Goin’ On for May could have been tough
without help from the ever-frustrated Maureen Dowd of the New
York Times. For Mothers’ Day, she served up a stew of complaints
about the racy guy mags — Maxim, Stuff and
FHM — that Wal-Mart just stopped selling. Such is the
stuff, she says, of Dubya’s tailhook landing on the U.S.S.
Lincoln two weeks ago: “The fabulously successful British
glossies were inspired by the American ‘guy culture’ of ‘Top Gun,’
‘Animal House’ and ‘Cheers.’ The hormonal graphics and absence of
erudition were designed to appeal to what one media expert called
“high-tech cave men.” If this girl had ever dated a pilot, a
submariner or a tank driver, she’d know that being a “high tech
cave man” is a career objective, not an insult.
Last year, ol’ Mo wrote about how tough it was for her to find a
guy in Manhattan. Dowd’s frustration boils over at the Dems’
inability to find a way to take Dubya on: “They don’t know how to
combat the Bushies’ visceral belief in action over explanation,
juice over justification.” Get used to it, Mo. Every real guy knows
it’s better to act decisively to solve some problem than to speak
eloquently without doing a damned thing about it. The kind of guy
— like Dubya — who qualifies to hang out in the squadron ready
rooms on the Lincoln, on the Grinder at BUDS, or pretty
much any other place you find warriors is not the kind of guy
you’re likely to find at a leftie cocktail party in the Lower East
Side. Or among the Democrats.
While Mo moans, the SGO is getting rough in Iraq and at Fort
Fumble. Task Force 75 — the group directing the WMD hunters — are
leaving Iraq empty-handed. Until they find the people who know
where the WMD are hidden in Iraq and — according to the latest
intel — Syria and Lebanon, those weapons will never be found.
Bashar Assad’s vague assurances to Colin Powell about shutting
down the terrorist sports bar that Damascus has become were
complete baloney, as even Assad admitted as soon as Powell left.
Syria openly supports and harbors every terrorist outfit known,
from Hizbollah to Ansar-al-Islam to al-Qaeda. This is not something
we can long ignore. Assad and his thugs are Baathists, Saddam’s
pals. There is no greater likelihood of their conversion to
democracy than there was for Saddam. We need to draw a line in the
Syrian sand, and use whatever forces are needed to replace Assad’s
government. We should remember that there can be no peace between
Israel and the Palestinians while Syria controls Hizbollah and
foments trouble in the West Bank and Gaza.
Mr. Rumsfeld finally sacked Army Secretary Tom White who opposed
transformation of the Army to Big Dog’s face, and behind his back.
Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki — also an opponent of
transformation, who orchestrated some of the criticism of the war
plan by retired generals during the Iraq campaign — will retire at
the end of June. Unfortunately, White’s replacement is John Roche,
former Air Force secretary whose only accomplishment was to
surrender preemptively to the feministas and fire the top four
leaders at the Air Force Academy before the investigations of the
many sexual assault allegations were close to completed. Roche may
try to canonize PFC Jessica Lynch, which will make all the services
more vulnerable to the feministas. Last week Dubya defaulted to the
services on the women in combat issue. With people such as Roche in
charge, this is gonna get ugly early.
Roche was chosen because he’ll back Mr. Rumsfeld’s plan to
transform the Army. The question is whether he can replace or run
over the remaining Shinseki adherents and other entrenched
old-thinkers. The first test of Roche will come in the budget
battles going on now. If he flunks this test, he’ll pass no other.
The Third Infantry Division’s tremendous charge from Basra north to
Baghdad in less than three days, and kicking tail whenever the
Iraqi “Elite” Republican Guard was encountered, is a testament to
the soldiers, their on-scene leaders, and their heaviest weapon:
the aging M1A1 Abrams tank. One lesson of Iraq is that if you can
get them to the battlefield, there’s nothing better on the ground
than a heavy, RPG-proof tank like Abrams (except battalions of
them, some with “USMC” painted on the side). The problem, as usual,
is that the Army can’t afford to do it. The money that should be
going to Abrams is going elsewhere.
Gen. Shinseki’s baby is an armored truck called “Stryker.” The
problems with Stryker (detailed in my piece in the latest American
Spectator) are that it can’t go where warriors need it to go, and
won’t do the job even if it can get there. It’s designed to keep
the peace in places like Bosnia, not fight wars in places like,
say, Syria or Iran. Some House Republicans, including Rep. Jim
Saxton, are asking the right question: Why shouldn’t we take the
money meant for Stryker, and modernize the M1A1 force? Good idea.
Kill Stryker, and use much of the money to give the Army the
upgraded tanks it needs. You’ll probably have enough left over
(Stryker is not only a bad idea, it’s an enormously expensive bad
idea) to upgrade the M113 light armored vehicle to the A3 version,
giving the Army another badly needed weapon system. At the same
time, Roche needs to help pick the new Army Chief.
The most obvious pick for Chief of Staff — Gen. Tommy Franks —
turned the job down in a meeting with Big Dog a couple of weeks
ago. If Franks doesn’t want it, there’s only one thing to do: go
down in the ranks to the one-star level. Find a heretic, an
unconventional thinker who is a real leader. Promote him to four
stars, and turn him loose. Pershing did that in 1939, coming out of
retirement to pick George C. Marshall for FDR. The hunt will take a
while, but the right guy is out there.
The ‘04 Pentagon budget is now in the Congressional pipeline,
and the pressures of the presidential election year will be felt on
every page of it. What the warriors need is always different from
what they get. But this time, the differences need to be narrowed
quickly.
The Pentagon is under pressure to tell the Hill about the
lessons learned. But the internal feuds — the leftover Clinton
generals and some who are just plain hidebound — don’t want that
question to be answered correctly. If it were, there would be many
more Special Operations units, and the money to create them without
lowering the standards of their predecessors. There would be an
acceleration of the Joint Strike Fighter program, the end of the
Stryker program, and a lot of other changes to take advantage of
the lessons learned in Iraq. There would be — in short — a
transformed budget to ready the military for the next campaign that
will be no more than a year away. No, make that months.
