{"id":17594,"date":"2010-02-21T14:25:42","date_gmt":"2010-02-21T19:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=17594"},"modified":"2010-02-21T14:25:42","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T19:25:42","slug":"the-us-military-and-wehrmacht-penis-envy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=17594","title":{"rendered":"The US Military and “Wehrmacht penis envy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alternet<\/a> has reposted an article from TomDispatch<\/a> about the US military’s “surprising fascination with failed German war thinking<\/a>” and the US military’s “Wehrmacht penis envy”. The article was written by William Astore, a retried Air Force Lt. Col who is a frequent critic of the US military in his writings on TomDispatch. In this particular article, Astore argues that the United States military has embraced flawed German military strategy and implies that many US military officers are closet Nazis.\u00a0 Alternet added their own introduction which was pretty much made the same the point. They even added this lovely picture:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

C’mon Alternet, I know its easy to play the Nazi card and it gets you guys web traffic from the anti-military left, but could you at least try to be original for once? Just for me? Please? PLEASE? (I said please)<\/p>\n

Aside from the fact that this is just a blatant attempt to bash the US military, Astore is factually inaccurate and displays a very shallow understanding of modern US military doctrine.<\/p>\n

First, Astore and Alternet attempt to compare conventional warfare campaigns like Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq to counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq is like comparing apples to oranges. Conventional warfare doctrines like manuever warfare and the counterinsurgency doctrine we have applied in Iraq and Afghanistan are separate strategies that are applied to different types of operations. They are not one and the same.<\/p>\n

Secondly, some of the doctrine that Astore discusses only has a limited or no basis at all in German military thinking. In fact, a lot of doctrine that Astore discusses was developed by Air Force Colonel John Boyd<\/a> and championed by his civilian allies in the Pentagon. Astore does not mention Boyd at all, even when discussing OODA loop<\/a> was one of Boyd’s most famous theories. It does not surprise that a retired Air Force lieutant colonel like Astore doesn’t discuss Boyd, however. The Air Force never truly embraced a lot of Boyd’s theories, which were more embraced by the Marine Corps and Army.\u00a0 In fact, more Marines showed up at Boyd’s funeral than airmen.<\/p>\n

Lastly, the concept of Blitzkrieg <\/em>was not a wholly German creation. There were many other military officers like Patton and Marshall Zhukov of the USSR who had embraced the concept of\u00a0 “lightning war” long before German tanks rolled across Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. Even President Roosevelt and his war department embraced this thinking, when they made the decision to put more resources into developing tanks, aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter aircraft instead of massive infantry formations and dozens of antiquated battleships.<\/p>\n

Astore was not trying to make a serious critique of US military doctrine, however. He was bashing the US military in the easiest way possible: by playing the Nazi card.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alternet has reposted an article from TomDispatch about the US military’s “surprising fascination with failed German … The US Military and “Wehrmacht penis envy”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}