Mac-Coleman

24 May 2013 –

What Did The President Say Yesterday?  I Simply Don’t Remember. 

When I wrote speeches for the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, I learned two rules for public speaking:  Pick something important to say; then, make sure you say it.  If you ignore these rules, eventually people will ignore you.  If the President’s goal on Thursday in front of National Defense University was to assuage people’s concerns about the ”scandales du jour,” he failed.  Our beleaguered president imposed an hour of ramblings on the American people while providing nothing to resolve the issues at hand.  Clearly, his comments on how to resolve the issues were weak.  It was the wrong speech at the wrong time.   

If the President’s goal was to remind the American people that his anti-terrorist policies have kept America safe for the last five years, he failed as well.  I am sure that he did not mean to imply that his anti-terrorist policies were a natural progression from his much-maligned predecessor’s; but, it certainly came across that way.  President Obama’s remarks also beg one to observe that recent terrorist attacks on American soil prove that President Bush did a better job protecting America than he has done.  I did like what he said about the use of drones to attack terrorist targets overseas; he sounded like a spokesman for Secretary Condaleeza Rice.  But, alas, he did not explain the legal issues surrounding the use of attack drones in circumstances-less-than-conventional war as part of a well-thought out plan to accomplish a cogent strategy.  Fleeting comments from both his supporters and his critics in the last twenty-four hours seem to confirm the President’s bad timing and poor performance.  The President is making himself increasingly irrelevant in creating and implementing U.S. foreign and domestic policy.  We don’t need a campaigner; we need a leader.       

The President’s comments about using drones to kill terrorists deserve further inspection.   As an Air Force targets officer and campaign planner, I learned a lot about warriors, weapons, and winning wars.  I learned that warriors and weapons are necessary, but romantic elements of warfare.  Courage, loyalty, physical strength, and selflessness are among the virtues that compel warriors to “go to the sound of the battle.”  As well, most warriors tend to prefer weapons that prove them worthy of victory over the enemy.  Such is the ethos of the profession of arms.  It is a powerful, cohesive element that has bound warriors together since the days of swords, shields, and slings.  It also has led our society to assume that “good” warfare requires some version of warriors facing each other on the battlefield, armed with weapons and with honor.   Even our legal thinking generally says that warfare should be conducted in this intimate manner. 

Unmanned combat aircraft—drones—are superb weapons to kill individual terrorists.  They take the fight to small, mobile targets quite effectively.  Radical terrorists fear drones because they are difficult to elude and to shoot down.  Why then do we have a political problem including drones in our planning?  The problem is their success; fewer warriors are needed on the battlefield to kill the enemy.  That bothers many people who justify violence only if it is done in a traditionally “fair” way and not from a “safe” distance.  Other critics naively contend that we could convince our enemies to become our friends if we weren't so coldly focused on killing them.  Such critics dwell on warriors and weapons, not on winning.  The President would resolve all such issues if, in his next speech, he were to present a clear strategy for victory and how his campaign plan uses both warriors and weapons to achieve it.  But, that would require him to publicly identify radical Islamic terrorists as the real enemy.  His obvious denial of this obvious fact makes the President’s present strategy—if he has one—suspect and any supporting plan, drones or no drones, ineffectual.  What we have now is a recipe for failure.

This warrior tradition recruits and sustains military personnel from a generally supportive society.  But, warriors alone, even armed with good weapons, rarely ensure victory; they require the building and execution of an adaptable campaign plan that dictates the weapons they use to attack specific targets to achieve certain results.  These results must achieve carefully considered strategic objectives.  Expert planners take into account, but do not rely on, a warrior ethos.  Martial music is for warriors; accurate history books are for planners.