Command staff organization: J-1, administration stovepipe; J-2, intelligence stovepipe — you get the idea. This antiquated organization is oblivious to what everyone else in the world is doing: flattening organization structure, with decentralized operations and more direct communications. This must be fixed.
My son will have to deal with the inevitable military-civilian rift and drift — which will become more severe in the future. He will also have to deal with the social issues we have not been able to fix. And they will get tougher, within a national debate over why we still need a strong military. My son’s generation must ultimately face the question of how much the military should be a reflection of U.S. society. The people of America will get the military they want, in due course, but it is up to the military to advise them about the risks and consequences of their decisions.
My son will face nontraditional missions in messy places that will make Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq look like a picnic. He will see a changed battlefield, with an accelerated tempo and greatly expanded knowledge base. He will witness a great drop in the sense of calling. People entering the military will not be imprinted with his code. On his watch, my son is likely to see a weapons of mass destruction event. Another and worse 9/11 will occur in some city, somewhere in the world where Americans are gathered. When that nasty bug or gas or nuke is released, it will forever change him and his institutions. At that point, all the lip service paid to dealing with such an eventuality will be revealed for what it is — lip service. And he will have to deal with it for real. In its wake, I hope he gets to deal with yet another — and better — Goldwater-Nichols arrangement.
What will we expect of him as a battlefield commander? Brains, guts, and determination — nothing new here. But we would ask for more than battlefield skill from our future commanders. We want character, sense of moral responsibility, and an ethical standard that rises above those of all other professions. We want him to be a model who accepts the profession of arms as a calling. We want him to take care of our sons and daughters and treat their lives as precious — putting them in harm’s way only if it truly counts. We’ll expect him to stand up to civilian leadership before thinking of his own career.
And I hope that we would think enough of him and his compatriots to show some respect for them along the way.
I have been all over this globe and exposed to most of the cultures on it. I am fascinated by them. I love the diversity. I want to understand them and embrace them. I could never understand prejudice or rejection or the sense of superiority that drive the hatemongers of the world. I lived through a tumultuous period of our history when our own minorities broke from second-class citizenship into full participation in this wonderful dream we call America. I have been proud of their accomplishments and contributions. They have proven the bigots wrong and made our nation greater. I hope the dream we have struggled to realize can be extended to the rest of the planet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Working on this book has been a long, hard process. Thanks to the friendship, encouragement, patience, prodding, creativity, and skillful contributions of Tom Clancy, Tony Koltz, Neil Nyren, Marty Greenberg, and Fred Williams, this project was made possible.
Примечания
1
In 2003, during and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it became clear that at that time the Iraqis actually possessed few, if any, WMD. The point of all their many games during the years of inspection now seems to have been to hide their ability to restart their WMD programs.
2
His predecessors included Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, the Coalition commander during the First Gulf War; Marine General Joe Hoar, one of Zinni’s oldest friends; and Army General Binnie Peay. He was succeeded in 2000 by Army General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander for the 2001 war in Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq… distinguished company.
3
Large zones of northern and southern Iraq were interdicted by the UN after the First Gulf War. The Iraqi military (with some exceptions) were not allowed to fly military aircraft or drive military vehicles in these zones.
4
A single droplet on the skin is lethal. And enough could be loaded into a missile warhead to kill most of the population of Tel Aviv.
5
Even though the UN resolution stated that UNSCOM would have unrestricted access to any facility they needed, the Iraqis had insisted on granting air access to only a single Iraqi site, the very inconvenient base at Habbaniyah. There had been protests, but it was a battle nobody wanted to fight.
6
The system naming military operations always uses two terms, with the first term indicating the theater. Thus, “Desert—” indicates a CENTCOM operation.
7
The advisers were assisted by a small team of Vietnamese Marines, a “cowboy,” a radio operator, and at
