Reminder: "FUBAR" was not coined by pacifists.

To criticize the current WOT decision-making is not to dis or criticise the military despite what some conservative, narrowband drug-store cowboys would have us believe. The system is structured such that civilian, political leadership calls the broad-strokes, and uniforms execute. Again, that's political leadership. The military follows orders and works with what they're given--which is usually less than what they need. (God love 'em for that alone.) In fact, service-people can often feel more whipsawed or perplexed than voters do when it comes to policy directives but, unlike voters, theirs is not to reason why... until they retire.

The American Conservative, December 1, 2003

In Rumsfeld's Shop[LINK]
A senior Air Force officer watches as the neocons consolidate their Pentagon coup.

By Karen Kwiatkowski

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski recently retired from the U.S. Air Force. Her final posting was as an analyst at the Pentagon. Below is the first of three installments describing her experience there. They provide a unique view of the Department of Defense during a period of intense ideological upheaval, as the United States prepared to launch–for the first time in its history–a "preventive" war.

The money graf....

I had observed that many of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon not only had limited military experience, if any at all, but they also advocated theories of war that struck me as rejections of classical liberalism, natural law, and constitutional strictures. More than that, the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the "Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States" agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact.

Note the publisher, observe the date, read the series, pray for sunshine.