Letter to the Prez

I love this website and applaud our president for his openness. I am a democrat and was an initial supporter of Hillary. However, I am so glad that it worked out as it did. I really like President Obama for lots of reasons: one is he smiles easily.

I plan to do this often, not that anybody reads or responds and that is not one of my interests. My need to commo is more important than our President's to read. However, he would do well to hear a guy like me on occasion. I am a retired military, 29 years, Chaplain (Colonel). I actually sent the President early on a copy of my memoir, Gun Totin Chaplain, from my time in Vietnam. Chaplains learn to be great observers and that is why I think my comments are very relevant here.

Overall, I hope the President takes to heart a Republican view, the late Walt Rostow when he said, "all a politician (President) has to do is get 60% of the people for him, 25% will be against everything and 15% are out to lunch. Good advice. So, he can't worry about opposition as he's doing the right thing and a great job, I think.

My military comment, however, is what all the above meant to get too: Generals are wonderful and honorable but they think in a vertical way: rarely does a really creative and innovative leader get to the rank of general: Patreaus may be an exception. But, sending more troops to Afganistan is what generals want. They always want more troops. Think Vietnam. But, before we commit more lives and years, honestly, we need a strategy. Here's a good one: we have a volunteer professional Army that constantly needs to be trained. Let's do our training in Afghanistan. The military spends millions of dollars in places like the National Training Center in California. Let's put most of those dollars into Afghanistan for our military.

We have executed a counter insurgency approach that will work and a long term effort may or may not succeed. We have to train anyway and why not do Afghanistan with this in mind. Our soldiers will get better and better at counter insurgency and so will the Afghans. This might work.