Pentagon plays war games

No wonder the military costs so much to operate. They spend millions creating committees to talk about how to fix what they screwed up rather than doing their job competently in the first place.

A broad Pentagon directive issued this week orders the U.S. military to be sure, the next time it goes to war, to prepare more thoroughly for picking up the pieces afterward.

For Pete's sake it took them a year just to come up with a directive - otherwise known as an interoffice memo?

The 11-page directive, signed Monday by acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, assigns long lists of specific responsibilities to the Pentagon's various civilian branches, military services and regional commands.

For instance, it instructs the Pentagon's undersecretary for personnel to develop methods for recruiting people for stability operations and to bolster instruction in foreign languages and cultures. It orders the undersecretary for intelligence to ensure that "suitable" information for stability operations is available. And it directs the undersecretary for policy to create a "stability operations center" and submit a semiannual report to the secretary of defense.

These and other measures appear to go a long way toward addressing shortfalls highlighted in a critical study last year of the Pentagon's approach to stability operations. The study, done by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, concluded that though U.S. forces are good at winning conventional battles, they have tended to give short shrift to managing the aftermath.

I could have written that directive in a week. Heck, the press has been suggesting the same fixes over at least the last three years. And this remark is somewhat disturbing.

But the Iraq conflict has made clear that a rapid exit is not always possible. Warning that Iraq may not prove an exception, the Defense Science Board recommended that stability operations be made an explicit mission of the Defense Department and treated with the same seriousness as combat operations. That led Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to order the directive, senior aides said.

Rather suggests an agenda that includes more pre-emptive strikes doesn't it and that cuts to the heart of what's wrong with our military at the moment. It's not the men, it's an administration that misuses them. Oh and you want to know why it took a year to write an 11 page memo? They couldn't decide who should monitor their compliance. In the end they decided, as always, to monitor themselves.