Re:John Boyd Compendium
by red-iron-pine on Friday July 14, 2023 @06:04PM
(#36730585)
I've never heard of a 500k Afghanistan plan.
But Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni ran a series of exercises that determined it would take 400k troops and 10 years to successfully occupy Iraq, defeat an insurgency, and leave a stable government that could stand on its own.
Rummy's plan, backed by Armitage and Wolfowitz, was for 170k. And no plan for civilian transition.
And it worked -- they won the conventional war, and botched the rest.
So the CIA chief told W “I can do it A-teams and some SF units” and thus started a 20 year lost cause and the regular Army generals had no doubt it would be.
The existance of any SF units causes a bias towards simple solutions and silver bullets. Solutions that multiple Presidents and DoD secretaries believe. Real generals just roll their eyes.
A Green Beret I met in the 80’s referred to Delta as “glorified door kickers.”