All Intensive Purposes

Here's a very interesting article from Military Affairs by a British general who served in Iraq, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, about the U.S. Army's approach to counterinsurgency operations. Aylwin-Foster suggests, inter alia, that the U.S. Army is too "kinetic" -- too ready to prefer offensive operations -- and too focused on the destruction of the enemy on military terms, rather than the subordination of military objectives to broader political goals. (As Clausewitz famously said, "war is merely the continuation of policy by other means.") But that's not a summary, merely a hint of what he has to say.

eta: Coverage of Aylwin-Foster's article in the Guardian and in TAPPED.

eta: After reading Aylwin-Foster's suggestion that the Army is too focused on winning conventional wars -- notwithstanding that there are now few militaries with which to have such a war -- I see that the Air Force is proposing to cut back on various existing capabilities (including half of our fleet of B-52s, and all of our U-2s and F-117s) to increase spending on the F-22 Raptor, a next-generation fighter designed to win the skies from a Soviet Air Force that no long exists. In the same vein, note the comment about the Air Force's efforts to mothball the A-10 Warthog, a fabulously effective ground-support aircraft.