Saturday, August 31, 2013

General Mattis on Syria.


via Business Insider...
Mattis continued to harp on having a political end state and clear goals before any military action — whether that be boots on the ground or no-fly zone — or else he said, "you invade a country, pull down a statue, then say 'now what do we do?'"
The general told Blitzer the military "is not worn out" and can carry out any mission, but "we should not fight wars without a clearly defined end state ... when you go to war, it can't be a half-step" — meaning, you have to be fully committed to winning.
Awesome.

Finally a bit of common sense.  Read it all here.

2 comments :

  1. You need to know what success looks like and constantly ask "Does the proposed element of action contribute towards that end state?"

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  2. I remember reading in the comments section on a yahoo article about the option to hit Syria. Most notable comment at the bottom was something like this:

    "We need to be more like Russia and China. They just sit back as the fight goes on, then only deal with the winners after it's over."

    I couldn't help but to think that if we took that approach to most cases it would have solved about 90% of our foreign policy failures.

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