Admiral William Fox Fallon – US Central Command – Fallon’s Military Strategies – Esquire
This is already all over the interwebs. I’ve not much more to add to the voluminous debate beyond:
- Barnett is a straight-shooter who I cannot believe ambushed Fallon; ergo,
- the Admiral knew what he was doing putting these views in his own words into the public domain.
This seems to me the dignified exit of a man who disagreed with the current administration’s policy on Iran not on the grounds of feasibility (quote: ‘…if it comes to war? “Get serious,” the admiral says. “These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.”‘) but principle. I’m pretty hawkish on Iran but I salute Adm. Fallon.
Sunday, 16, March, 2008 at 9:02 am |
Nothing like people reading the same indications and coming up with completely different answers. Certainly keeps life interesting.
Terry Atlas writes in U.S. News and World Report that there are “6 Signs the U.S. may be headed to War in Iran” Available at http://www.usnews.com/blogs/news-desk/2008/03/11/6-signs-the-us-may-be-headed-for-war-in-iran.html
At the same time William Arkin decides that there are “Six Signs the U.S. is Not Headed for War in Iran” Available at http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2008/03/six_signs_the_us_is_not_headed_1.html?nav=rss_blog
While I will leave it to the reader to decided which side of the fence they believe, I sit on the “No War” side. Could the U.S. conduct some strikes against the suspected sites of WMD production and research, sure. The problem is how many do we know about and to what degree of accuracy. The recent history in this regard is not good. According to CENTAF “By the Numbers” during the Second Gulf War, the coalition conducted 102 missions against WMD targets as Time Sensitive Targets and struck a total of 1840 DMPI’s connected with WMD. The problem was that not one of those targets or DMPI’s was found after the fact to have any connection with WMD. And that was against a country where the coalition had been flying over two thirds of the nation enforcing the “No-Fly zones” and gathering intelligence for 12 years before the invasion.
The practical question which appears in my feeble brain, is if the U.S. attacks Iran, how does it eventually extract its forces from Iraq? People and aircraft are easy, they can fly out. But the equipment which has been shipped in to Iraq, should (with the exception of prepositioned equipment in Kuwait and Qatar) be shipped out, unless the U.S. is willing to either kill the strategic airlift fleet trying to fly it out or abandoning it on the ground. The Straits of Hormuz are a vulnerability to the free flow of ship traffic. There was a reason that the Iranians based most of their C801 SSM at Bandar-e-Abbas with prepared firing sites all along the road to Jask and also on Qeshm island. A prepared firing site can be merely a bulldozed flat area. I know this issue has consumed the CNO Study Group at the Naval War College for years and I’ll wager their answers did not assume that a significant amount of forces would be tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time this problem arose.