Sunday, September 2, 2007

Pandering or Pure Ignorance? Neither is Becoming

Does Mark Udall have the basic understanding of military needs to be a US Senator, or does he just pander to the particular audience he faces? For anyone who has even the slightest understanding of military history and needs (I am a retired Army Officer), he made an absolutely frightening statement to some pinon canyon ranchers:

"But I am far from convinced that this expansion is necessary, particularly to fight to the kind of war on terror we are currently facing, which is urban-based," Udall said.


He repeated an argument we have seen and debunked at length elsewhere:

The ugly claim about the military that it always trains to fight the last war can sometimes be true. For Zimmermann, the last (insurgency) phase of the Iraq war is the last war that we should train and equip for, and he freely chastises the military and politicians for not coming to that conclusion...

Zimmermann chooses to ignore any possibility that China might eventually decide it has the power and technology to challenge the United States in a land war. We guess that he missed the news reports of their ASAT test (which we hear has the Air Force scrambling anew to figure out how to protect its satellites). Likewise, he assumes that the North Korean menace has disappeared and that we will never fight on that terrain again. Zimmerman accepts that Putin and his successors have totally given up on their country's historic desire to dominate its neighbors. None of those potential enemies are likely to involve any urban combat before traditional fire and maneuver surrounds the cities.

Ralf Zimmerman, a retired Armor LTC, was making arguments we know he knew to be false, misleading, and very dangerous. Worse, he was attaching the prestige of his retired rank to them to suck in the gullible.

Now Mark Udall has made the same argument. Given his years on the Armed Services committee, we think that he knows his argument is false, misleading, and very dangerous. If he doesn't, he is a slow learner who doesn't belong in the Senate, and if he does, he is pandering with National Security issues and most definitely doesn't belong in the Senate. Is it any wonder that the public doesn't trust Democrats with national security?

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