Quote:
Originally Posted by BigLouie
Most of you have no clue as to Patraeus. In the military and with those who follow the military Patraeus was the most accomplished general of our generation and probably since WWII. He reshaped the way the armed forces fought wars, especially the type of war you find in Iraq and Afgahn. Iraq would have turned out a whole lot worse if not for him.
He had to leave the CIA because in the world of spies vs spies you look for any edge and one of the biggest is infidelity so he had to leave and did so. I suspect he will still be consulting behind the scenes. Once in the CIA you never really leave.
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Dude you're all wrong about this.
First of all he's very controversial within the military, and is very disliked by his peers for many reasons.
He's a political officer who curried favor with the boys in the NSC, who latched onto his silly writings as a way out of the fiasco they'd created.
His counter-insurgency theories are wacked, and he doesn't understand the first thing about Vietnam or any of the cases he uses in his book. He's a phoney technocratic bureaucratic wimp. He's short, skinny, un-athletic, introverted, and uses the wrong cologne.
To say he's credited for changing "the way we fight wars" is ridiculous because each war is totally different and requires a different strategy, etc. Counter-insurgency is a very old set of principles going back to the 1950s, and for him to claim any new doctrine is totally stupid.
Furthermore the reason why the "surge" made for an improvement had nothing to do with counter-insurgency. It had only to do with the US surrendering to the Sunnis and forming a subordinate relationship to them because the US lost in the field. Call it what you want but the US lost to the Sunnis, and the US surrendered to them.
As totally misinformed as that statement is your other statement that his infidelity relates to the world of "spy vs. spy" is even more idiotic because the Director of Central Intelligence isn't a target of anyone for blackmail or anything else like agents or case officers are any more than the National Security Advisor is.
The DCI isn't a "spy," he's a bureaucrat.
And that shows how much you know, or don't know, about the miliary or the intel world.
