How to be a cartoonist

From an Army pub in World War II

Full thing is here: http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/11/education-how-to-be-cartoonist-in-16.html

The McMaster Promotion board

Kaplan has a good article in slate about something that's real important, but usually flies well under the radar of the Media and the public. He notes how the latest Army general officer promotion board may represent a very important seismic shift in the Army's leadership: http://www.slate.com/id/2196647/

The guy at the top always matters, for good or ill. In the case of the ill, for example, we can't really expect a major across-the-board improvement in the U.S. strategic situation so long as Bush is president.
But, to the extent that lower-ranking officials have quality they can make improvements within their sphere. There may be no clearer example of this than the Department of Defense. The shortcomings of Rumfeld are made starkly evident by the dramatic improvements under Gates, who may be one of the most important and effective SecDefs ever.

Gates has brought back to the Pentagon something that has been sorely lacking otherwise in the Bush administration -- accountability. Gates has been willing to fire failures. And now we are also seeing that he's interested in rewarding successes.

Unhappy with the kinds of decisions being made by the all-important Army one-star general promotion boards he brought back Gen. Petraeus from the war zone to oversea a promotion board. This alone can't help but send a powerful message how important Gates considered this board.

One of the biggest scandals of the last few years was the failure of two successive promotion boards to promote COL H.R. McMaster. There's hardly a more famous -- and justly so -- O-6 in the Army and it's failure to give him a star was nothing short of scandalous. Anyone who has been following McMaster's career has little doubt that he is one of the most outstanding officers of his generation -- bearing comparison with luminaries such as George C. Marshall and Creighton Abrams.

So Gates filled the board with the kind of outstanding successful combat officers the Army needs. Officers who had managed to rise to the top despite the system, but who could now reform that system to promote like-minded juniors in sufficient numbers to make a difference, as Kaplan points out.

I sure as hell hope the Navy names an aircraft carrier after this guy someday.

Ranger killed on tour of duty No. 7!

Details here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/us-soldier-killed-in-afgh_b_99842.html

But the headline version is that an Army soldier was killed this week in Afghanistan on his seventh tour of duty in the country in six years.

This sort of thing just can't be kept up.

Army reducing tours

The Army will reportedly begin cutting tours of duty in Iraq back down to 12 months.
This will help, but we're still way over extended.
Even during Vietnam and Korea the U.S. was sure to keep a strategic reserve, usually the 82d Airborne.
Right now we have none. Every single brigade is either in Iraq, recovering for Iraq or preparing for Iraq. We're supposed to have an airborne brigade, a heavy brigade and a third brigade at minimum available for contingencies. We don't.
Even more cause for concern is the degrading of training. Because they're serving as counterinsurgency infantry, our artillerymen are not training in firing their guns. I suspect other specialized troops are also not getting needed training. How many armored troops are serving as infantry and not getting to practice their tank tables?
This could have severe consequences should we get involved in a heavy contingency anytime soon.
We're skating on the edge.

Ballon Juice asks Are they (Wingnuts) really that dumb?

Er, yes.
As, of course, are their pals on the left side of the spectrum. Indeed, as soon as one becomes wedded to any one ideology, one loses the capacity to think and analyze. The entire attraction of an ideology is the ability to stop thinking. Thinking is hard work, after all. Reality is never as neat as theater.
Check out Cole for details: http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=9759
But the gist of the story is this. Obama cited an example of how the Iraq war has distracted us from finishing the job in Afghanistan. He cited the experience of an Army officer who had to deploy with only 24 men in his platoon to Afghanistan because demands for Iraq siphoned off the rest.
The blognuts descended instantly with criticisms.most of which were pretty stupid off the bat. Some jumped on the fact that a captain wasn't a platoon leader's rank. Naturally, I assumed when I heard the story that the man was a current captain who was most likely a lieutenant when he was a platoon leader. Duh.
Without rehashing the whole thing, several media outlets checked the original source and the essence of the story is completely accurate, within the necessary limits of making a point within the constraints of a sound bite.
Conservatives used to be most devastating when they made clearly reasoned, logical arguments based on facts. There are a handful who still remember how to do that. William F. Buckley, of course, and his heir apparent as the intellectual conservative, George Will. Until that style comes back into fashion, and they drive back the yahoos, they're not likely to come in from the wilderness anytime soon.

The cost of war

Image from Intel Dump

MAJ Andrew Olmsted, otherwise known as the blogger G'Kar, was killed i action in Iraq.




Blogger G'Kar has the last word: http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/01/andy-olmsted.html

The news report:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080103/wl_mideast_afp/iraqustoll_080103192540

Mark Levin is a fool

Here's the excerpt, part of a long anti-McCain piece. Emphasis mine:

Moreover, one of the problems Bush had when he took office was that the military had been hollowed out. There weren't enough soldiers, and I would argue there still aren't. Bush had to simultaneously rebuild the military and fight the war. If McCain were such a great leader on military affairs, and as competent at "reaching across the aisle and working with Democrats" as he claims, why didn't he make this a priority? In fact, he has spent a great deal of his time in the Senate on domestic issues, and in that he has a mixed record. And when he did focus on the Pentagon, he attacked its wastefulness and sought, at times, to micro-manage it. But let's no rewrite his record into something it was not.

The war's been going on for four years! There's still not enough troops and somehow that's not Bush's fault, it's McCains! This is Bushist logic to the extreme. In every other war we fought one of the very first measures that the President at the time took was to increase the size of the Army. Bush not only did not increase the Army, but his SecDef resisted calls to do so. Levin says McCain attacked Penatgon wastefulness (this is a bad thing?) and tried to micro-manage it. Well, maybe that was necessary beacuse the war was so badly managed by Bush.