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Tom Ricks: Gen. H.R. McMaster, the brain behind Petraeus, speaks:
Go read. Ricks adds, "The article is especially interesting because word around the Pentagon is that McMaster is running a comprehensive review of U.S. strategy in Middle Eastern for Petraeus, who recently took over as chief of Central Command."In Iraq, as in Vietnam, observes McMaster, "the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other."
The original war plan assumed that the United States could start pulling out shortly after the invasion. "Five years later, it is clear that the initial planning for the war misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the enemy, and underappreciated the difficulty of the mission."
McMaster hits it out of the park in discussing how inadequate troop levels undercut the war effort. Despite its overly Latinate style, this is one of the most insightful comments I have ever seen on Rumsfeld's botched oversight of the Iraq war from 2003 to the end of 2006 ...