Obama At Annapolis

Yesterday at the Naval Academy graduation, Obama said the following:

"I will only send you into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done," the president told more than 1,000 graduates during a sun-splashed ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

Is that a fact. You're killin' me here, Mr President. This sort of pandering must have been insulting to those Midshipmen whose knowledge of US wars throughout our history no doubt far exceeds your own. I have a news flash: This is no longer the Presidential campaign, and your audience no longer consists solely of left-wing, obsequious lap dogs, but now contains people who actually know something about history (which is why they're not liberals).

NEWS FLASH: you fight the wars you must, when you must, with the military and supplies you have at the time. You don't know who your enemy is going to be, or what his capabilities will be, in time to re-configure the military appropriately before action is required. This is why the military is "always prepared to fight the last war". Obama's perfect world (where everyone has free health care, no one is living in poverty, ancient enemies are hugging) and where we get to pick when, where, and how we fight our wars simply has never, and will never, exist.

The only US wars I can think of where we were prepared going in were the Indian Wars throughout the 19th Century and the Spanish-American War. In both those cases the "enemy" was so overmatched that not much else mattered. But even in the Spanish-American war, the Spanish Mauser (magazine-fed, rapid-fire with smokeless powder) was a clearly superior weapon to the American single-shot Springfield Trapdoor using black powder, or even to the Krag-Jorgenson carried by Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. Heck, we hadn't had a war since 1865 and we had plenty of time to tweak our troops, equipment, etc. And why hadn't anyone thought to build the Panama Canal beforehand, so the USS Oregon didn't have to steam all the way from Seattle and around the Cape to reach Cuba? But stuff happens: Maine blows up (Spanish didn't do it, as it turned out. We can talk about the wisdom of storing coal in enclosed spaces in a humid climate some other time), and Bang! We're at war.

"Strategy and well-defined goals"? Let's take the first war: The American Revolution. Heck, we didn't even have an army or navy when declaring war on the major superpower in the world at the time. Strategy? Who had time for strategy when every other musket took a different type of ammunition, the troops couldn't even march in formation (very important on the battlefield in those days), and there was not even an Army infrastructure? There was a shortage of everything from uniforms, transport, weapons, and trained troops. And other than independence (which half the country was against) we didn't have a goal or a plan as to how we were going to achieve it. In about a hundred years Helmuth von Moltke the Elder would state the universal truth that any military man would instantly recognize: "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy". So, even if you go in prepared and with what you think is clearly defined plan and goals, all are subject to rapid change when hostilities commence.

The Barbary Pirates (1802): Having recently voluntarily given up the protection of the Royal Navy, American merchant ships were now the fat targets of pirates operating out of North Africa. What does Obama think (if he's even familiar with it, which I doubt), we just sent a fleet over there with Johnny Depp acting as informant, and took care of it? Ask Commodore William Bainbridge how tough it was to fight oared pirate galleys within the confines of Tripoli Harbor with ocean-going warships like the 36-gun frigate Philadelphia. If Obama had been President, I'm sure we would have known this and taken a fleet of galleys. It took Stephen Decatur and a good chunk of the US naval strength at the time, along with Marine Lt Presley O'Bannon, who recruited some fierce Georgian warriors called Mameluks, to subdue the Dey of Algiers.

OK, I could go thru all the wars, but I'll spare you: 1812, the Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, Korea, Viet Nam and, of course, the favorite of the uninformed Left: Iraq. In all cases we ran into unforeseeable situations for which our training, equipment, and strategy were inadequate. I wonder if Obama's ever heard of Tarawa, Pelilieu, Battle of Santa Cruz, Kasserine Pass, and I'm sure if Obama had been President during WW 2, we'd have been totally prepared for them Kamikaze's. Why, we'd have "up-armored" every ship in the 5th Fleet!

I'm sure Obama is the smartest President in American history, but the bottom line is that never in US history did we go into a war with "the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done". We might have thought we did going in, but back to Moltke. And we always thought the war we were about to declare was "absolutely necessary". You don't get to pick the timing of your wars, which makes Obama's dream list just that. Only someone without an understanding of past wars would think it was possible to do as Obama promised the midshipmen. It must have been unsettling to them that their Commander in Chief was either so uninformed about history, or thought they were.