I have some depressing thoughts on this and am debating, or mulling over, just how to express them.
My depressing thoughts --on that brief piece by the former Marine captain at least-- would run to asking how much more useful are his remarks now than are those of the retired generals and DoD guys and former Nat Sec chiefs lately.... i.e. they're all implicitly copping
now to inability or unwillingness
before now to have persuaded their superiors of their thoughts while on active military duty or in other government service.
The buck always stops at the President's desk but he's not likely to have all the info he might need to make a best call on anything if too many down the line inputs are squelched.
Sure there must be filters. There's a story "Funes the Memorious" (by Jorge Luis Borges) in which the protagonist suffers from absorbing and remembering every detail of everything all the time (as result of a head injury suffered falling off a horse). He of course completely loses all those wonderful and essential human abilities to generalize, to abstract, to synthesize... and finds himself spiraling into the morass of his own mind, essentially spending all of each day just to catalogue the day's details.
Of course in reality, our leaders need gatekeepers and filters amongst their subordinates. The question is how siloed each level up from the battlefield should be.
The veteran Marine captain and now Senate candidate Lucas Kunce is not wrong in his Kansas City Star op-ed piece, and he's been refreshingly succinct. But his observations are from long hindsight, and the missing part of "lessons learned" remains this: why can't we refrain from "mission creep" while it's happening and while we're lying about the fact that it's happening as well as that it's not working?
Everyone makes mistakes. Biggest mistake resides in denying that fact.
Après moi, le déluge... of more mistakes, and the series of self-centered concerns about losing position or livelihood. With the US experience in Afghanistan there were even times when players with a fair amount of power copped to the fact that "this is not working" but then we poured another billion bucks into the hole to finish out the week and shuffled the paperwork to get the next surge or regular rotation of troops deployed. And sent all those overclassified cables about how messed up things were, as if that weren't common knowledge among many more people than those cleared to read the things.
I get the need for filters and sequestered discussions and certainly for diplomatic protocol... even in the civilian world there are such things. I remember my boss standing up one day in a fairly large conference of in-house clients and her project team, after her counterpart on the client side had suddenly launched into berating one of his own subordinates in front of the whole group. My boss then gestured for the rest of her team to stand up too, quickly gathered up her papers, nodded at her counterpart --who had abruptly stopped speaking-- and said "We'll reschedule, so you can get these details squared away privately" and turned around and just walked out, with us in tow.
In the elevator she said to us "Don't ever let your clients embarrass each other in your presence if you can help it: it's bad for business and can reflect badly on you."
Still, in affairs of government, when it's clear that someone on the other side of any negotiation is behaving like an [expletives deleted] and there's limited ability on one's own side to change that behavior, there comes a time when it seems futile to bury acknowledgment of that fact among the other side's members in classified cables or triple-walled digital document safes. Especially if the media have been saying the quiet part out loud for years, based on reliable if anonymous sources on the inside. Go-along and get-along and averting eyes from naked emperors eventually comes off as pandering, ass covering or worse, perhaps a nod to corruption that keeps an untenable situation rolling. All the more infuriating when the dam breaks and everyone suddenly sees a tsunami and calls it that.
