Hummers and Necon Wisdom

I read in the paper the other day that the Pentagon is rushing to replace the Humvee vehicle with something . . . anything! . . . with greater survivability in the streets of Baghdad. It seems that the Humvee, which in its original incarnation had almost no armor, and thus today is the proverbial sitting quacker when Islamic (and other) nutcases start tossing high explosive at’em.

Amusing, in a grim way.

You see, when the Neocon-Bushites took over the government in the coup of 2000, one of the first things that merry band of draft dodgers and absentee National Guardists did was tell the professional soldiers of the country How To Wage War. Chief among these Fuehrer-directives was that war, in the future, would be a matter of speed and maneuver. You don’t defeat the enemy by taking him head-on. You dash around his strong-points, get behind him, attack his command-control-communications, and generally blast him into pieces before he knows what hit him.

Ah, but the professional soldiers already knew that. They’d known since the 1940s, when people like Rommel and Patton proved it hands down. They also knew that those kinds of tactics work . . . in open country, and in conventional warfare. That’s why they were so successful in the first and second Gulf Wars.

BUT, the professional soldiers ALSO knew that low-intensity, asymmetrical, urban war is another kettle of piranhas entirely. There, you have to deal with endless pin-prick attacks, in back alleys and basements, day in and day out. In THAT kind of war, a billion dollar supersonic jet with a smart nuke is pretty damn useless, thank you very much. But a good old sandbag may just save your life . . .

And all of that the soldiers of the Pentagon knew . . .

Wanna guess who wouldn’t listen? Huh? Wanna?

And now we have the products of Neocon wisdom . . . coming home . . . in body bags.