Lawrence Korb's unhelpful letter today to the editor of the New York Times

Today's
New York Times carries this letter from
Lawrence Korb, who in the early 1980s was an assistant secretary of defense for
manpower, reserve affairs, installations and logistics:

I disagree with Gen. H. R.
McMaster ("The Pipe Dream of Easy War," Sunday Review, July
21) when he attributes our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan to an overreliance
on new technology, which clouded our understanding of the conflicts.

The problems in both wars
were created primarily because President George W. Bush and his advisers
ignored the advice of the Army chief of staff about how many troops to send
into Iraq and the on-the-ground commanders' warnings about disbanding the Iraqi
Army and civil service. Similarly, in Afghanistan they snatched defeat from the
jaws of victory in 2003 by ignoring our military commanders and diverting
manpower and resources to the unnecessary war in Iraq.

This
is the problem I have with Dr. Korb's letter: I worry that it helps enable the
U.S military to go on blaming the civilians for everything that went wrong in
Iraq. Yes, I know the Bush administration made huge mistakes -- like invading
Iraq in the first place, not having a plan for what to do once it got there,
and operating on bizarre assumptions rather than a realistic assessment of the
way forward. In fact, I wrote a book about
all that.

That
said, the U.S. military made huge mistakes as well, but has not had to confront
them nearly as much. The fact of the matter is that our military was badly
unprepared for the tasks facing it in Iraq, especially at the general officer
level. Had the Bush administration listened to General Shinseki and sent twice
as many troops, we likely would have had our poorly commanded troops simply
pissing off twice as many Iraqis. Good strategy will fix bad tactics, but good
tactics will not fix bad strategy, or take the place of no strategy.

Why
do I think the U.S. military has failed to heed the lessons of Iraq? Because I
think that, among other things, it has never addressed two major problems it
had there. The first is torture, the second is the effect of troop rotations on
the conduct of the war. (For example, why did some units torture, and others
didn't? And what was the effect of rotating all but the four stars out every
year?) Korb's letter, and similar expressions, simply make it easier for the
military to go on whistling past the graveyard.