Comments by "Gort" (@gort8203) on "This will change how you think about the Iraq War." video.

  1. DePuy didn't redesign the US Army to refight Vietnam, he was faced with designing a post-Vietnam army to deter and if necessary fight major conventional wars. That is why the the army was so successful on the battlefield in the Gulf War of 1991, which was a conventional rather than a proxy guerilla war. I do not think DePuy shares responsibility for the mess of Iraq. He did not set geopolitical grand strategy, and shouldn't be blamed for the mistakes that ruined Iraq both pre and post 2003. The US military is controlled (often against its own judgement) by civilian authority. The civilians that planned that war had a superb military designed to destroy the enemy, not a military designed to build a nation out of the rubble of that destruction. The national command authority had no plan for the aftermath of "mission complete" because they didn't think past removal of Saddam -- apparently they thought that simple first step was all that was necessary for a regime change. But it was a delusion to think a democratic state would spontaneously form in the rubble of the former regime. When General Franks asked for more forces for the invasion, SecDef Rumsfeld told him he always wanted more, but that the NCA wanted the army to go in light with minimal footprint on this one. He essentially gave Franks Dark Helmet's line from Spaceballs: "Prepare, prepare, you're always preparing; just do it!" Rumsfeld wanted to go in light, relying on airpower instead of artillery and other hard to transport heavy equipment, because they saw no need to stick around to clean up the mess. Franks may not have seen the need to do much beyond simply winning the ground war, but that goal was not really his fault, and certainly not DePuy's fault.
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