Additionally, Putin imposed an invasion plan on the Russian military that was impossible to achieve, one current U.S. official argued. “You can’t really separate out the issue of Russian military competency from the fact that they were shackled to an impossible plan, which led to poor military preparation,” the official said.
Let's make some slight substitutions to that.
Additionally, [the Biden administration] imposed an [Afghanistan withdrawal] plan on the [American] military that was impossible to achieve... “You can’t really separate out the issue of [American] military competency from the fact that they were shackled to an impossible plan, which led to poor military preparation[.]"
Ultimately the military leadership in both places is corrupted by their proximity to power, and their refusal to take the professional hit that would come from resigning in protest rather than executing terrible orders. I don't know that the VDV is nearly as good as the 82nd Airborne, but neither of them can execute until the corruption problem is fixed, because the corruption problem handcuffs the military to an incompetence problem. Elected leadership controlling the military's policy may make good sense, but strategy, operations, and tactics should be left to the professionals.
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I am increasingly convinced that bureaucratic decay is inevitable unless sharply corrected for. I have heard knowledgeable people advance the theory that WWII was won despite inefficiency because of superior resources, but that by the end our military planning was quite good. We had sidelined many of the incompetents. Yet immediately after, they reasserted themselves, resentful at their having been supplanted, bringing us back to methods that "they had always said would work." Except the didn't and this began to show as early as Korea. Vietnam was the completed work of that reassertion of authority interfering with those who were competent. We are now unable to complete any military actions, even with enormous advantages, because we immediately undermine ourselves. No one defeats us - we do it ourselves.
I don't know this to be true, but it does broadly fit the facts. And if it is true, we should simply not be entering any but the most desperately necessary encounters until we have dismantled everything and rebuilt it. Because we will win big but then somehow figure out how to lose anyway.
Great military leaders who buck the system, get fired...forced into retirement. General Douglas Macarthur is one example from the Korean War, as is General Wes Westmoreland from the conflagration in Vietnam.
Col. Hackworth, who served in Korea and Vietnam, thought it was partly the fault of an intolerance of mistakes. One mistake would end a career, so everyone interested in a military career focused on not making mistakes instead of excelling at the mission. The people who were best at not making mistakes made it higher than anyone else. In his opinion, the system set up for promotion was undermining everything else.
I'm beginning to think we had a functional military in WWII, because nearly *everyone* was in, and those people hadn't spent their lives marinating in a useless mind-stifling bureaucracy. They weren't careerists - they were in it to end it so that they could get back to their real lives. The rank on their shoulders didn't define them as people, it was just a temporary thing adopted for a utilitarian organizing purpose. The careerists got carried away by a tidal wave of average Americans.
In times of peace, the military had always been uselessly backwards. They ignored Simon Lake, the inventor of the submarine, favoring their own corrupt cronies who couldn't figure out control problems Simon had actively solved. They *hated* Billy Mitchell, because he was right about aircraft being a danger to navy ships. It seems all our best military figures were rebels of a sort against a hostile heirarchy, and they only really get to shine (as opposed to sit in a brig somewhere) when the nation needs them too badly to abuse!
You can see this in the military history of other countries too. Sun Yat Sen in Korea, for example.
(Maybe a generalized lesson to draw: Bureaucracy is evil. It isn't a necessary evil, it's an evil evil, that rots civilizations and strangles human potential.)
Grant was declasse. Patton was something like the Westpoint class goat. Morgan and Marion weren't the first choices of the continental congress, but they brought home the victories.
Want to know where the future is?: Look for people who are too dirtied up by experience in the real world for the aristos and bureaucrats to countenance!
Lindbergh too, now that I recall. Charles Lindbergh was hated by FDR's crowd. So much so that they refused to allow him to serve, impugning his loyalty to the US. (No, he wasn't at all enthusiastic about the prospect of going to war with Germny, *again*, as his father wasn't enthusiastic about WWI.) Lindbergh and Henry Ford both have had their names unfairly blackened, and their views misrepresented by the same sort of lunatics shrieking Nazi today.
So instead, he kicked around the pacific theater as a "consultant", debugging aircraft, inventing instruments on the fly, and occasionally sneaking off to perform fighter bomber raids.
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