{"id":37668,"date":"2013-09-22T08:06:09","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T12:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=37668"},"modified":"2013-09-22T08:07:39","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T12:07:39","slug":"obama-military-leaders-part-ways-on-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=37668","title":{"rendered":"Obama & military leaders part ways on policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post<\/a> has noticed that military leaders and the President aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the use of the military as a means to a political end. That’s probably because the military sees itself as a tool of policy that must be unfettered in order to accomplish the country’s stated goals abroad, while the White House thinks that the use of the military is a means to make domestic points with voters and it’s political base. <\/p>\n

About the Afghanistan surge, the Post writes;<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s relationship with the military was indelibly shaped early in his presidency by the 2009 debate over whether a troop surge in Afghanistan that his generals were pressing for stood a good chance of turning around the worsening conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom his perspective, he trusted the military and they betrayed him,\u201d said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a blunt assessment that is shared by many in defense and policymaking circles. The president felt boxed into a political corner by leaks about the troop numbers the generals wanted. After that, \u201cI think this White House made it pretty clear that they intended to run all foreign policy from the Executive Office Building.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And form the military’s perspective, Obama betrayed the troops by seeking a political compromise on a military solution in Afghanistan. According to campaign-Obama, Afghanistan was the only war worth fighting, but he only gave the commanders half of the troops they told him that they needed to win. The result has been exactly the outcome that those commanders and the CIA predicted – that the troops are currently withdrawing under fire.<\/p>\n

Obama’s recent threat to use force in Syria to make political points without actualy accomplishing in the region has met with criticism from two of his Defense Secretaries, William gates and Leon Panetta;<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s two former defense secretaries weighed in on the controversy Tuesday night, saying they disagreed with the president\u2019s decision to seek congressional authorization for a strike. While Leon E. Panetta said a cruise missile attack would have been worthwhile, Robert M. Gates said the plan was akin to \u201cthrowing gasoline on an extremely complex fire in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple of days to underscore or validate a point or principle is not a strategy,\u201d Gates said at a forum in Dallas in which the two appeared<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Post neglects to mention the harsh criticism Panetta heaped on President Obama, the New York Times<\/a> didn’t;<\/p>\n

Mr. Panetta, also speaking at the forum, said the president should have kept his word after he had pledged action if Syria used chemical weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word,\u201d Mr. Panetta said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce the president came to that conclusion, then he should have directed limited action, going after Assad, to make very clear to the world that when we draw a line and we give our word,\u201d then \u201cwe back it up,\u201d Mr. Panetta said. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Obama\/Biden campaign in 2012 leaned heavily on the military’s accomplishments during their first term, and all the while, the administration was planning to balance the federal debt on the backs of the military and on the veterans who gave them their campaign slogans. Loss of money for training and equipment are plunging the military into a hollow force. Steep personnel cuts are causing the military to lose faith in the commitment to them by the government.<\/p>\n

Their inability to negotiate a successful Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the government of Iraq has allowed that country to fall back into a morass of blood of thousands, turning the clock back to the 2006 Sunni\/Shiite civil war. The situation there is causing the administration to examine ways they can get US troops back into Iraq.<\/p>\n

From the Post;<\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. military feels it has been burnt with half-measures,\u201d said Peter J. Munson, a retired Marine officer who most recently served as a senior adviser to a Marine Corps commander. \u201cThere is going to be on the part of our senior military leaders an aversion to using force when you don\u2019t have clear ends and escalation can take on a life of its own.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mostly because military solutions shouldn’t be restrained by public opinion polls and shouldn’t be dressed up to look pretty and clean for public consumption. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post has noticed that military leaders and the President aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the … Obama & military leaders part ways on policy<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37668","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}