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| Afghanistan |
| The Wrong War: Marine-to-Marine reporting from Bing West in Afghanistan |
| 2011-03-07 |
| Posted by:GolfBravoUSMC |
| #1 Remember a 100 years on the frontier from the Ohio river to still chasing renegades jumping the reservation even after 1900. The Problem of Doctrine. “Three special conditions set this mission apart from more orthodox military assignments. First, it pitted the army against an enemy who usually could not be clearly identified and differentiated from kinsmen not disposed at the moment to be enemies. Indians could change with bewildering rapidity from friend to foe to neutral, and rarely could one be confidently distinguished from another...Second, Indian service placed the army in opposition to a people that aroused conflicting emotions... And third, the Indians mission gave the army a foe unconventional both in the techniques and aims of warfare... He fought on his own terms and, except when cornered or when his family was endangered, declined to fight at all unless he enjoyed overwhelming odds...These special conditions of the Indian mission made the U.S. Army not so much a little army as a big police force...for a century the army tried to perform its unconventional mission with conventional organization and methods. The result was an Indian record that contained more failures than successes and a lack of preparedness for conventional war that became painfully evident in 1812, 1846, 1861, and 1898." excerpted from Chapter 3, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian 1866-1891 by Robert M. Utley. This is like deja vu all over again. - Yogi Berra |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2011-03-07 12:37 |