« Polls and Demographic Trends | Main | Condi Rocks »
February 9, 2005
Inside Centcom
A few days ago I finished Inside Centcom: The Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Marine Lt Gen Michael DeLong. Gen DeLong was Tommy Franks' second-in-command during both wars. It was a fairly good read, although nothing special. I got it pretty much on a whim while buying several other books. DeLong makes a few interesting observations and revelations, although if you have to choose definately go with Tommy Franks' American General. I blogged about it fairly extensively a few months ago. Check out the "best of" link at right for a few of those posts.
Here are some of the interesting parts of the book;
on Tommy Franks
Gen Franks is portrayed as very tough and very fair. Franks is the last person you want to cross and the first one you want on your side.
He was hard on his staff, but he loved and respected them. He was a loner, yet he rarely made decisions alone. He wasn't trusting, yet he delegated tremendously. Franks was one of the few men I couldn't figure out, but then, nobody else could either.
He didn't suffer fools gladly, either.
He knew exactly what he wanted, how he wanted it; he was detail oriented and one of the most focused people I'd ever met. His mind grabbed onto a subject like a pit bull; god help you if you tried to deviate from it. He said he had absolutely zero tolerance for digressing from the exact topic he wanted discussed.
His statement to Delong at the end of their first meeting;
"I know how to be professionally mean"Over the course of the next few years, many lesser ranking generals at Centcom would find out exactly what that meant.
I tried - not always successfully - to act as a buffer between Franks and the staff. Many one - and - two - stars wanted face time with Franks, which they didn't really need, and I tried to discourage them because I knew that Franks didn't like having people hand around. He could see though an agenda instantly, and God help the person who wasn't prepared. If the generals insisted, I let them enter. When they came out, time and again, they wished they hadn't.on Richard Clarke
Gen. DeLong pretty has the same opinion of him that Gen Franks had, which is to say not very good. I wrote about what Franks had to say in a post a few months ago. Clarke, you'll recall, was a Clinton and Bush terrorism expert who has had little good to say about the Bush Administration.
While DeLong was not as harsh as Franks in his assessment, he says that Clarke
...specifically told us how comfortable he was with all that the President (Bush) was doing for the War on Terror. But he was not an insider. He was not included in any of the numerous video teleconferences I attended with President Bush. I suspect we might have had better knowledge of existing intelligence from the Middle East than Clarke did.
Tora Bora
DeLong confirms what most of us who have studied the matter know; we didn't screw up the operation as John Kerry said we did. It wasn't as if we deliberately "outsourced" the operation, we simply couldn't get a large number of troops into the area. For that matter, neither could our Afghan allies. We did what we could with what we had.
The French
This will surprise some readers, but it shouldn't, for reasons I'll review shortly.
The French were instrumental in getting the new Afghan army off the ground. Not only did they fund it, they even trained every third batallion. the didn't let us forget it either. Later, whenever France was publicly criticized by anyone in the U.S., I'd get a phone call from the French chairman of their Joint Chiefs.The French can and have been at times extremely helpful in the War on Terror. At the same time they will turn right around and stab us in the back. One need only recall stories of the French made anti-tank missiles with "2003" stamped on them that we found in Iraq. And don't even get me started on Oil-for-Food. What gives?
He'd say, "You recall that we helped you with the Afghan army, don't you?"
I would answer, "Yes sir, I do. And we love you."
The French will do whatever is in their interest to do. National interest unvarnished by "sentimental" concerns such as spreading democracy.
Conclusion
A decent book, overall, if nothing particularly special. After reading Franks' book I wanted to get another perspective on him, which was my main reason for reading "Inside Centcom". It served that purpose well.
Next up: In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror by Michelle Malkin.
Posted by Tom at February 9, 2005 9:41 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.theredhunter.com/mt/refer.cgi/291
