Signs of Intelligent Thought Spotted Online!

Two articles out there today (and the accompanying comments) are actually quite thoughtful in their ideas. They are completely unrelated to each other (unless you start trying to draw parallels between them) other than both being intelligent and detailed and worthy of note.

Information Dissemination, a primarily naval blog, has a discussion that starts talking about prepositioning equipment sets, and morphs into The Expeditionary... Army

The US Army reinvented itself for the war in Iraq in 2005, and reinvented itself again in 2009 in Afghanistan - and bought completely new gear both times specific to each conflict. This isn't new, the Army did the same thing in Vietnam and WWII. Relative to the Navy and Air Force, the US Army can be raised and reinvented very quickly when the money for war is provided.

Meanwhile, over at the relatively new Grand Blog Tarkin, a not-so-subtle discussion of The Jedi Way of War has definite analogues to today's military. That said, I personally believe that the battle scenes in the Star Wars movies are chaotic disasters more suitable for Braveheart than Saving Private Ryan because Lucas doesn't know (or care) about military tactics, doctrine, etc, but he knows what he thinks looks 'dramatic' on-screen.

Although the Jedi were renowned diplomats and keepers of the peace, they were not politicians or strategists, and never critically examined the Separatist’s grievances to identify the root causes of the conflict. Without understanding the causes of conflict, they failed to develop a theory of victory. Without this, they merely continued to pursue of the Separatist leaders and the destruction of their army after the first engagement. They failed to reframe from their roles as individual combatants to leaders of an Army for a multitude of reasons explored below.

By: Brant