The captains writing in today’s Post are projecting their own experiences from 2005 onto the situation in Iraq today. Regarding the sergeants and specialists who wrote the op-ed for the Times, I would submit that they are being absolutely frank and honest about their own experiences in the war–but that their perspective is too limited for their opinions to have any value regarding the progress of the war. Those men live, and die, at the sharp end of the spear, and their attention is focused on war at the micro- level. They know what is happening in their own squad, platoon, and company. Given the dispersed nature of operations, they may have a general idea of what is happening at battalion. But of operations at brigade and above, they have very little idea. They have no way of knowing whether their situation is normative or not. They may have gotten the bad luck of the draw and pulled a particularly violent or difficult area of operations. They may just have had bad luck–there is really no way to know, unless one were to build up a mosaic covering every squad, platoon and company in Iraq. Consider the responses you would have gotten regarding the progress of World War II if you relied upon the testimony of sergeants and corporals in the rifle platoons fighting on Omaha Beach, or in the hedgerows of Normandy, or in the Huertgen Forest; or on Marine riflemen after the landings on Tarawa, Peleliu, or Iwo Jima. Ask them, and they would undoubtedly tell you the war was going badly, because from their perspective, it was. Everything is always SNAFU or FUBAR, or worse. Ask lieutenants and captains, and the situation is not much better. You have to get up to the field grades before you can get a broad enough perspective to see the total picture, but not so high as to become detached from the situation on the ground. In other words, you’re really looking at the battalion and brigade/regimental commanders, who are typically O-5 and O-6 (Lt. Colonels and Colonels respectively). Go above that level, and general officers are too likely to give you the politically correct line. Go below it, and you get the worms-eye view, which is like looking at the world through a straw. Listen to the battalion and brigade commanders–they know the real score, and are the most likely to give it to you straight.
