If you thought about it for more than five seconds, it was enough to make you scream. Here was Gen. Michael Hayden, either brave enough or naïve enough to take on the thankless job of heading the CIA, and every newspaper in the country was carrying headlines wondering if a military man should be heading the agency.
The question of military subordination to civilian authority is a perennial issue and one that I personally wrestled with 20 years ago, playing a modest role in crafting the Goldwater-Nichols Act that reformed the Pentagon command structure.
But the Hayden controversy wasn't about some general on horseback lording it over subservient civilians. This was about class divisions in a nation at war. Think I'm kidding? Just listen to the condescending, eyeglasses-down-the-nose tut-tutting of the New York Times: "It seems ill-advised to put an Air Force general at the helm of the CIA, a civilian agency."
If their tone sounds vaguely familiar, that's probably because it is. Just imagine if the Times editorial had said, "It seems ill-advised to put a black or Hispanic as head of the CIA, there in suburban Virginia where so many white people work."
Such an appearance of institutional racism would have been instantly recognized and deplored maybe even by blockading the trucks delivering the Times to your local Starbucks.
But the same sloppy thinking, mindless stereotypes and casual acceptance of second-class citizenship that once marked American race relations all now reign unchallenged whenever the military class appears to be getting a little uppity. Fact is, there is a gap already miles-wide and growing every day between the American people and their highly professional military.
Of course, it may be harder to see that gap in San Antonio than anywhere else. Here, welcoming signs at the airport greet returning troops. A quick skyward glance may bring glimpses of C-17 transports circling for landings that will send badly wounded soldiers to the world-class medical facilities at Fort Sam. A recent convention in town honored a UTSA student who would soon pick up his diploma and an ROTC commission before moving on to pilot training.
A just-released book confirms how rare such previously routine occurrences have become in this country. The authors of "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service" present a devastating portrait of a professional military increasingly segregated from our mainstream institutions. The media and academe are obvious examples, but so is Hollywood, where exemplars of personal sacrifice are almost nonexistent just imagine Leonardo DiCaprio abandoning the sound stage for a bunk in Marine boot camp.
The last U.S. president to have a serving family member in wartime was Lyndon Johnson. While the names of great families such as Bush and Kennedy are intertwined with examples of World War II service and sacrifice, today no grandchild of either line considers it a personal obligation to wear their country's uniform.
It is probably fortunate that Hayden's family had solid working-class Pittsburgh roots, that he was educated at Duquesne rather than Harvard and that some of his formative professional experiences included command of the Air Intelligence Agency right here in San Antonio.
There is even some irony in this, because the military treasures its own brand of ethnic humor one acquaintance wryly observing that Hayden isn't really a member of the military because he serves in the Air Force. It is an inside joke, of course, slyly reflecting the fact that the laid-back, electronic systems culture of the Air Force is unlike the infantry. But it represents an ongoing revolution in warfare just ask the Taliban and those few JDAM-shocked survivors of the Iraqi Republican Guard.
And that's the serious point behind the Hayden nomination. At places like AIA and the National Security Agency, he presided over a series of transformations from the challenge of combating traditional Cold War hierarchies to the uncertain threats of network-centered jihadists often fighting the bureaucrats at every step.
Even an outsider can look at the CIA and understand the problems: that reorganization doesn't automatically lead to transformation, that aging intelligence officers with master's degrees in Soviet studies need to be eased out and that the dominant agency culture of whining, second-guessing and world-class leaking needs to be expunged.
It still isn't clear if a "systems guy" can overhaul an organization whose stock in trade is human intelligence spies if you're speaking Texan. But coming up on five years after 9-11, the agency needs either a transformation guru like Hayden or else a Marine drill sergeant, if that's what it takes.
If he is successful, better get ready for even more outraged screaming. The Times can even be forgiven though not too much for simply parroting the anti-military lines picked up from various members of Congress. All should have known better and have recognized that the preferred refuges of whining, second-guessing bureaucrats are their protectors on Capitol Hill.
One of those protectors even said last week that Hayden was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe so, but possibly this same test should also be applied to Congress during a transformation process that includes not just Hayden and his new charges at CIA but each and every one of us that one in November they call an election.
Retired Col. Kenneth Allard is an author, MSNBC military analyst and executive in residence at UTSA.
#1
It's true, I keep hearing a bad idea to have a military guy, but nobody says EXACTLY why, just some subtle references that's it's a CILIVIAN agency. Well DUH, but it's mainly an Intelligence agency too and the President likes him!
#2
Even an outsider can look at the CIA and understand the problems: . . . the dominant agency culture of whining, second-guessing and world-class leaking needs to be expunged.
. . . But coming up on five years after 9-11, the agency needs either a transformation guru like Hayden or else a Marine drill sergeant, if that's what it takes..
No truer words have EVER been written. "culture of whining, second-guessing and world-class leaking". THis is what drove so many good ops people and analysts out in the 90's.
And the dumb bastards like Leahy want to keep it that way.
#3
Transformation is always an extreemly painful event. Those old cold warriors were the ones that kept us safe as kids from the Soviets, we should not forget that and recognise them for it. Times do change and those old dogs should have been moved on in the 90's. Times are different and a different warrior is needed, I only wish the old dogs had the honor to recognise it and move on themselves.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
05/14/2006 11:21 Comments ||
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#4
Some of us did Pan49 - we moved because we saw the change in the trheat and those that didnt, didnt want us around "stirring up trouble", and being politically incorrect. It was easy to get called a bigot when you started saying things about fundamentalist islamists, wahabbists and the like being the source of incited terror, or agreeing with those that did. And even worse start sayign we should do something even if it doesnt mean go-along get-along anymore with the Powers That Be, even if there is risk that a Cover-Your-Ass bureacrat cannot accept.
The Bureacrats and Poilitcal Correctness Police won those battles. The first put in the "I dont care its not an acceptable risk tothis department or my job", and the second made certain was of thinking forbidden. They put blinders and blindfolds on us. We have the Cole, Khobar, etc and 9-11 as a result.
And these are the people leaking for political gain, to sabotage reform at the cost of national security. They are the ones Hayden will get rid of. And thats why they are screaming so loud no via thier mouthpieces in the ignorant press and tools/fools in Congress.
#5
OS: Do you think Hayden can fix it? Institutional change is extreemly difficult, and usually the guy that brings the change is drummed out. Only to be seen as the father of the new organization later in history. If he does change it I see this as his likely course of action and he must see it comming making im a true patriot.
This agency I see is as critical, if not more than our military, and you know I'm 26 year activ Army. We saw the terrorists comming in the Army as well and were charged with looking for a war in order to be relevant. Fortunately we had Rumsfelt to push the old dogs out and bring in the right generals.
I wish Hayden the best. He will certainly pay for it.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
05/14/2006 11:54 Comments ||
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#6
Wasn't the CIA started by military people to begin with?
Posted by: Phil ||
05/14/2006 12:17 Comments ||
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#7
CIA was started by OSS military back some 60 years ago. But has long since morphed into somehting else.
And yes, I hope Hayden can do the things he needs to. But I doubt he wil be able to do them because the structure of the CIA is monolithic - each part buttresses the other in terms of Bureaucrats and risk-averse CYA types. I think to be truly effective it will need to be broken up, withat least covert ops, analaysis and humint development all in thier own agency, the rest can be left as a husk. Unlike the Cold War, Covert action, HUMINT and Analyisis should no longer hold to an interdependant unified worlview and interlocking tasking - they need to be independent of each other and able to task each other without political influence and entanglement over how each other does the job.
The problem is that the CIA was structured for a monolithic target (Soviet Union) and a monolithic opponent (KGB/GRU). It is no more capable of responding to today's challenges than the Big Division Slow Tank military of the 1970's would be up to the challenges in the inital battle for Irq or the current fighting in Afghanistan. The Army changed. The CIA hasn't. The military is effective, the CIA isnt. There it is in a nutshell.
Thats why I and others went back to the military side of things when we left the "big leagues" of the IC's various agencies. The military at least tolerated a bit of *intelligent* dissent, especially from the civilians, and even moreso on the SOCOM side of things - just few jobs were there until after Rummy took over.
Im now just another "contractor" (and semi-retired at that), but one thats been there done that and got the wings to prove it. I just hope that Gen Hayden can swing the axe freely and cut the place into the chunks it needs to be cut into.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
05/14/2006 12:58 Comments ||
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#10
OS - right on! I spent 26 years in the Air Force in imint. I did well in Europe, but poorly in the States. The reason wasn't my ability or training, but the difference in perspective. In Europe, we worked to ensure we'd be ready to deal with an attack across the Iron Curtain. The folks in Omaha were always targeting the old Soviet Union, and nothing else had any validity. Tac Recce was considered a playground - nothing done was ever done because it HAD to be done, but to satisfy a box on the checklist, then back to goofing off and having fun.
We have multiple enemies today, ranging from a resurging Russia, an arrogant China, incipient trouble caused by islamonazis, dictators in Africa and Latin America, and an aging Europe that wants to ignore every problem so they can go on enjoying their decaying worldview. We need agencies, ranging from the military to the intelligence community to State, that need to understand the world as it is, instead of how they wish it were. If General Hayden can get that across to the bureaucrats at the CIA, then he should be our next Sec/State as well!
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
05/14/2006 15:55 Comments ||
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Here are two news stories from the end of last week. The first one you may have heard about. As "The Today Show's" Matt Lauer put it:
"Does the government have your number? This morning a shocking new report that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans."
The second story comes from the United Kingdom and what with Lauer's hyperventilating you may have missed it. It was the official report into the July 7 bus and Tube bombings. As The Times of London summarized the conclusions:
"Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the bomb cell, had come to the attention of MI5 [Britain's domestic intelligence agency] on five occasions but had never been pursued as a serious suspect . . .
"A lack of communication between police Special Branch units, MI5 and other agencies had hampered the intelligence-gathering operation;
"There was a lack of co-operation with foreign intelligence services and inadequate intelligence coverage in . . ."
Etc., etc., ad nauseam.
So there are now two basic templates in terrorism media coverage:
Template A (note to editors: to be used after every terrorist atrocity): "Angry family members, experts and opposition politicians demand to know why complacent government didn't connect the dots."
Template B (note to editors: to be used in the run-up to the next terrorist atrocity): "Shocking new report leaked to New York Times for Pulitzer Prize Leak Of The Year Award nomination reveals that paranoid government officials are trying to connect the dots! See pages 3,4,6,7,8, 13-37."
How do you connect the dots? To take one example of what we're up against, two days before 9/11, a very brave man, the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated in Afghanistan by killers posing as journalists. His murderers were Algerians traveling on Belgian passports who'd arrived in that part of the world on visas issued by the Pakistani High Commission in the United Kingdom. That's three more countries than many Americans have visited. The jihadists are not "primitives". They're part of a sophisticated network: They travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people -- and kill them. They're as globalized as McDonald's -- but, on the whole, they fill in less paperwork. They're very good at compartmentalizing operations: They don't leave footprints, just a toeprint in Country A in Time Zone B and another toe in Country E in Time Zone K. You have to sift through millions of dots to discern two that might be worth connecting.
I'm a strong believer in privacy rights. I don't see why Americans are obligated to give the government their bank account details and the holdings therein. Other revenue agencies in other free societies don't require that level of disclosure. But, given that the people of the United States are apparently entirely cool with that, it's hard to see why lists of phone numbers (i.e., your monthly statement) with no identifying information attached to them is of such a vastly different order of magnitude. By definition, "connecting the dots" involves getting to see the dots in the first place.
Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) feels differently. "Look at this headline," huffed the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The secret collection of phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. Now, are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaida?"
No. But next time he's flying from D.C. to Burlington, Vt., on a Friday afternoon he might look at the security line: Tens of millions of Americans are having to take their coats and shoes off! Are you telling me that tens of millions of ordinary shoe-wearing Americans are involved with al-Qaida?
Of course not. Fifteen out of 19 of the 9/11 killers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. So let's scrap the tens of millions of law-abiding phone records, and say we only want to examine the long-distance phone bills of, say, young men of Saudi origin living in the United States. Can you imagine what Leahy and Lauer would say to that? Oh, no! Racial profiling! The government's snooping on people whose only crime is "dialing while Arab." In a country whose Transportation Security Administration personnel recently pulled Daniel Brown off the plane as a security threat because he had traces of gunpowder on his boots -- he was a uniformed U.S. Marine on his way home from Iraq -- in such a culture any security measure will involve "tens of millions of Americans": again by definition, if one can't profile on the basis of religion or national origin or any other identifying mark with identity-group grievance potential, every program will have to be at least nominally universal.
Last week, apropos the Moussaoui case, I remarked on the absurdity of victims of the London Blitz demanding the German perpetrators be brought before a British court. Melanie Phillips, a columnist with the Daily Mail in London and author of the alarming new book Londonistan, responded dryly, "Ah, but if we were fighting World War Two now, we'd lose."
She may be right. It's certainly hard to imagine Pat Leahy as FDR or Harry Truman or any other warmongering Democrat of yore. To be sure, most of Pat's Vermont voters would say there is no war; it's just a lot of fearmongering got up by Bush and Cheney to distract from the chads they stole in Florida or whatever. And they're right -- if, by "war," you mean tank battles in the North African desert and air forces bombing English cities night after night. But today no country in the world can fight that kind of war with America. If that's all "war" is, then (once more by definition) there can be no war. If you seek to weaken, demoralize and bleed to death the United States and its allies, you can only do it asymmetrically -- by killing thousands of people and then demanding a criminal trial, by liaising with terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan and then demanding the government cease inspecting your phone records.
I yield to no one in my antipathy to government, but not everyone who's on the federal payroll is a boob, a time-server, a politically motivated malcontent or principal leak supplier to the New York Times. Suppose you're a savvy mid-level guy in Washington, you've just noticed a pattern, you think there might be something in it. But it requires enormous will to talk your bosses into agreeing to investigate further, and everyone up the chain is thinking, gee, if this gets out, will Pat Leahy haul me before the Senate and kill my promotion prospects? There was a lot of that before 9/11, and thousands died.
Imagine if wed reported and opined on WWII the way we do now.
by Victor Davis Hanson
I think Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall conducted the Second World War brilliantly, despite thousands of mistakes. But I can also envision how our present intelligentsia and punditocracy would have sized up their sometimes less than perfect efforts or applied their own reporting to the struggle against Japan and Germany. So imagine something like the following op-ed appearing, say, around May 1, 1945.
The Present Debacle
May 21, 1945 After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed island hopping.
Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a bunch of dead-enders, was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.
Worse still, our sources in the intelligence community speak of a billion-dollar boondoggle now underway in the American southwest. This improbable super-weapon (with the patently absurd name Manhattan Project in the midst of a desert no less!) promises in one fell swoop to erase our mistakes and give us instant deliverance from our blunders no concern, of course, for the thousands of innocents who would be vaporized if such a monstrous fantasy bomb were ever actually to work.
We are only now coming off even more terrible losses in Europe, after being surprised by a supposedly defeated enemy in the Ardennes where another 20,000 Americans were killed and another 60,000 wounded or missing again, due to our continued strategic incompetence and abject intelligence failures. Macabre reports of American bazooka shells bouncing off German Tiger tanks and our Shermans ablaze like Ronson lighters have only now come to light as we plow the Belgium countryside for yet another new American war cemetery. Tragically, this is not the first, but the fourth year of this war, when victory rather than endless bloodshed has been long promised.
A number of issues arise. Why is Henry Stimson (Gentlemen do not read each other's mail) still Secretary of War? After the debacles at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines tragedy, the Kasserine Pass disaster, the unforeseen bocage in Normandy, the Falaise Gap escape, the Anzio mess, the fatal detour to Rome, the surprise at the Bulge, the bloodbath at Tarawa, and now the Iwo Jima and Okinawa nightmares, is not five years of his incompetence and arrogance enough? A number of our retired generals seems to agree, who have recently bravely come forward to remind us that Sec. Stimson long ago tried to dismantle key elements of our intelligence services, attempted to curtail the operational command of our Army Air Corps generals in conducting bombings of Europe, and has on more than one occasion intervened to remove targets from Gen. LeMays campaign over Japan.
As we see thousands of Americans dying and our enemies still in power after four years of war, it is also legitimate to question the stewardship of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall. The Sherman tank tragedy, the daylight bombing fiasco, the absence of even minimally suitable anti-tank weapons and torpedoes all these lapses came on his watch, and the man at the top must take full responsibility for mistakes that have now cost thousands of American lives. Indeed, it is not just that America has worse tanks and guns than our German enemies, but they are inferior even to the rockets and armor of our Soviet allies. The recent publication of The Sherman Tank Scandal follows other revelations published in Asleep at the Philippines, The Flight of Gen. MacArthur, Gen. Patton and the Atrocities on Sicily, Do Americans Execute P.O.Ws? Torture on Guadalcanal, Incinerating Women and Children? and Civilian Massacres in Germany publications in their totality that suggest a military out of control as often as it is incompetent.
Such problems start at the top. It is not out of Roosevelt hating, but out of the need for truth that requires this paper to remind the American people that Mr. Roosevelt, in whose hands our collective fate lies, has been untruthful to his wife about his liaisons, untruthful to the American people about the extent of his crippling illness, and thus, not surprisingly, untruthful to the United States Congress about the extent of our prewar involvement with the British Empire in its European war and the secret nature of our present commitments.
Recently we have learned that President Roosevelt, the former law school dropout, once again has violated basic freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. Supposed German suspects were subject to military tribunals, tried in secret, and then executed. Tens of thousands of Italians, Germans, and Japanese war-captives are detained in hundreds of American prison compounds, without charges and often in secret. How many were truly captured in uniform, and under what conditions, is never disclosed.
Unfortunately this violation of American values comes not in isolation, but on the heels of the unlawful internment of thousands of American citizens in Western concentration camps, the cover-up of the Cobra disaster in Normandy and the criminally negligent killing of General McNair, and still more rumors that hundreds of American soldiers perished in secret in training exercises on the eve of the Normandy invasion. Yet, the American people to this day have no precise idea how many of their enlisted men and officers have been killed, much less where they perished or how.
Indeed, what little we know comes to light only due to the brave efforts of a few unnamed operatives in the Office of Strategic Services who have in secret provided such information concerning patently illegal activities to the responsible news organizations.
Yet even this governments propaganda efforts ring hallow, as we noticed with the recently released film footage purportedly showing Adolph Hitler incompetently handling a Colt .45 revolver. In fact, such a weapon, little known in Germany, is hard to load and shoot, especially the early model that the Fuhrer was shown trying to fire. To be fair, his apparent unease is not necessarily proof that Mr. Hitler was unfamiliar with firearms, much less fraudulent in his demonstration of military experience.
Remember as well that these clandestine transgressions of this administration follow a long record of constitutional disrespect whether trying to pack the Supreme Court with compliant justices, unilaterally turning over our destroyers to the United Kingdom, or, well before Pearl Harbor, ordering, by fiat, attacks on the high seas against German submarines. Such abuses of presidential authority, characterized by intrigue with British agents and unauthorized spying on foreign nationals, go a long way in explaining the German decision to declare war against us on December 8, 1941, presenting the United States with the present catastrophe of a two-front conflict.
We can envision that when this lamentable war is over, fought with such malfeasance, the real heroes will not be Gen. Marshall, Secretary Stimson, or yes-men like Gen Eisenhower, but courageous mavericks such as a Charles Lindbergh or Senator Robert Taft, who long ago warned us that we were provoking an unnecessary war, one that, as they feared, was subsequently to be waged barbarically and yet incompetently at the same time.
The final irony is that we may well end up friendlier with our current fascist enemies than with our Communist allies. It is not hard to envision a policy looming on the horizon that soon coddles Hitlers current friend Gen. Franco, while opposing his dire enemy Joseph Stalin. We have it on good authority that already there are postwar contingency plans to train and reform the Japanese and German militaries to serve as a bulwark against a Communist Soviet Union and a soon to be Communist China, as America readies for yet another war, one that may last not five, but 50 years. How ironic that a struggle that started out in 1939 to ensure a free Eastern Europe and China may well end up, at best, guaranteeing their enslavement to totalitarians every bit as cruel as Hitler and Tojo.
Citizens should not have to look to our actors and intellectuals for answers, but, in the absence of political accountability, they often do. After the release of The True Story of the B-17 Slaughter, Gary Cooper thankfully came forward to remind us how President Roosevelt took us into a British war that we were utterly unprepared for. Next look for Coops recently completed and powerful American Gestapo this fall. Likewise, Jimmy Stewart remarked from the front lines above Germany (so unlike our president, who failed to serve in any of Americas past wars) that it is hard to know who the real enemy is after we have bombed the children of Hamburg. And Clark Gable is currently preparing a documentary on the Pacific theater, 12/7, that outlines the racist nature of that campaign that seeks the extermination of all the living Japanese we encounter.
Finally, we welcome the upcoming courageous anthology edited by John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Worse Than Our Enemies?, that charts the near criminal direction of American foreign policy under this administrations plans of total and endless war, of preparing for a new imperial conflict against the Soviet Union before the current one with Germany and Japan is even over. It is in this context that the venerable John Ford recently resigned from the Navy, and instead will produce a series of films Why We Shouldnt Fight that will reveal what was really behind this needless campaign of annihilation against the Japanese.
#1
Leave it up to VDH to put things into proper perspective.
The infotainment industry has wealth and power beyond any historical precedent, and neither they nor the public really know how to deal with it.
Throughout history sane societies appreciated entertainers/storytellers but certainly didn't give them the exalted status they enjoy now. If anything, they properly regarded them as a bit off kilter. It may be several more generations before we all do. Until then, we will see the treatment of WWII that VDH lays out as the standard rather than the one that actually took place at that time.
The antiwar moonbats (leftists and "libertarians" alike) would argue that this struggle in no way matches the one against fascism.
They're wrong, of course, but they have to think that way. If it were otherwise, it would mean their entire world view was incorrect to below its foundations, and they'd be faced with the unpleasant and difficult task of rethinking their lives. I doubt they have the honesty or work ethic or grounding in Western civilization for that.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
05/14/2006 8:54 Comments ||
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#3
"20 to 50 years...great powers" - iff India can stop Radical Islam andor China from taking it over, vv RED STAR TURBANIZATION. INdia will then become another Chinese-controlled albeit unannexed Secular North Korea = de facto Islamic Province of IRAN > SOCIALIST-COMMUNIST, MILITARIZED, NUCLEARIZED, WELL-ARMED BUT STARVING AND GEOPOL WEAK LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW, ATTACKING AND WARRING WID NEIGHBORS IN ORDER TO SPREAD BOTH THE SOCIALIST FAITH + THE STARVATION.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
May 21, 1945 After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed island hopping.
