top u..s commander in hot water

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin

This is from the Rolling Stone Article:

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his ****ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Rupert: This does not make Obama look very good.

Riot: I disagree

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

considering how things went when the troop increase was suggested, by the man in charge of waging the war, and rejected...i'm not surprised at these comments. obama is out of his league, and this is just one more instance that proves it. he had no earthly idea how to proceed, and chose to completely ignore the suggestions and advice from his head man on the ground back right after taking office. this reminds me of how the germans waged war under hitler. now, before anyone gets their panties in a wad, i'm in no way likening obama to hitler...however, the fact that hitler felt the need to have a real hand in the waging of that war directly contributed to the germans losing that war (thank goodness for that).
now, just think if every time pershing in ww1, or eisenhower in ww2, had to go and beg for extra men from their cic's? hell, we'd still be in the trenches on the western front. but no, the presidents recognized that men who had trained since high school for military service, and had been taught planning and logistics, were those best to make these decisions-and they stayed the hell out of the way.

[Riot]

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

I think for a new President taking the advice of the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon isn't a bad thing.

The rest of the article around the one paragraph:

From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the ****ers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.

Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to ThAfghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.

[Riot]

Originally Posted by Danzig

considering how things went when the troop increase was suggested, by the man in charge of waging the war, and rejected...i'm not surprised at these comments. obama is out of his league, and this is just one more instance that proves it. he had no earthly idea how to proceed, and chose to completely ignore the suggestions and advice from his head man on the ground back right after taking office.

Not according to the Rolling Stone article.

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Riot

Not according to the Rolling Stone article.

i am still at work, and will read the article in its entirety at home. i just remember, back when extra troops were requested, obama didn't grant everything that the general asked for at that time.

[miraja2]

Originally Posted by Danzig

i am still at work, and will read the article in its entirety at home. i just remember, back when extra troops were requested, obama didn't grant everything that the general asked for at that time.

Basically McChrystal said he needed 40,000 more troops.
The administration responded by launching a review of the entire Afghanistan strategy.
At the end of the review the administration embraced most - but not all - of McChrystal's strategy and sent roughly 30,000 more troops to the region.

miraja2's suggestion to pull all the troops out and leave Afghanistan was ignored completely.

[Danzig]

what a depressing article.

[dellinger63]

Originally Posted by Riot

Not according to the Rolling Stone article.

Let's be clear. The General got the extra troops after a 3 month delay during which Obama did his damnest not to send them and then assigned a pullout date letting the enemy know the end is near. A patented U.N. move by the way.