12 Names on a Wall in Washington D.C.
Forgotten by Many but Not By Me
To those who died serving USAECAV 1966-1968 Countrywide
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall Page
Database of the 58,195 Names on The Wall in Wash,D.C. This is the most accurate database online.
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The recent article by George Friedman (left) of STRATFOR, "Never Fight a Land War In Asia", is worthy of a close read:
We also applaud Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates (left) for the following statement:
“Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”
Considering the events in the Middle East and the struggles by the young population in those countries to progress, the US has learned the hard way that our purposed reasons for going to war would have taken care of themselves had we not been pressured by the Military Industrial Complex and the Intelligence Communities to stage fruitless incursions that enriched large corporations at the expense of American lives.
The alternative is diplomacy, not understood as an alternative to war but as another tool in statecraft alongside war. Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States. That is what happened during the Iran-Iraq war. It wasn’t pretty, but neither was the alternative.
Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating. The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results. Using U.S. land power as part of a combined arms strategy is occasionally effective in defeating conventional forces, as it was with North Korea (and not China) but is inadequate to the demands of occupation warfare. It makes too few troops available for success, and it does not know how many troops might be needed.
This is not a policy failure of any particular U.S. president. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have encountered precisely the same problem, which is that the forces that have existed in Eurasia, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Korea to the Taliban in Afghanistan, have either been too numerous or too agile (or both) for U.S. ground forces to deal with. In any war, the primary goal is not to be defeated. An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message. It is the same one MacArthur delivered, and the one Dwight Eisenhower exercised when he refused to intervene in Vietnam on France’s behalf. As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one."
From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan this writer has traveled a road of combat illness, weapons odysseys, recovery and lessons learned over 40 years. Has our leadership become wiser and learned their lessons as well?
http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/11/odyssey-of-armaments.html
