Lara M. Dadkhah On CAS = FAIL
Lara M. Dadkhah, once a graduate student in Security Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, has written the most brain-dead op-ed I’ve read on the war in Afghanistan in years. It’s an infantile perspective on a complex dynamic. Lots of cheerleading, no insight.
There’s not much to it:
So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.
Or this one:
Logic dictates that no well-ordered army would give up its advantages and expect to win, and the United States military, which does not have the manpower in Afghanistan to fight the insurgents one-on-one, is no exception.
Her point is much like Zen’s anecdote of the drunk guy looking for his keys under the streetlamp rather than where he lost them, because that’s where he can see. She’s saying CAS sorties haven’t kept pace with the increase in US operations. No shit. There’s lots of material available to her if she wants to come out of the scorched earth school of thought and understand even the basics of what it takes to win the kind of war we’re fighting.
What even more bizarre about this nonsense, is the vagueness of Dadkhah’s background and current employer. Why is she shilling for the air power folks? Does she work for Boeing – in marketing? Is she just an incompetent self-declared ‘intelligence analyst’?
Jumping into what is available on Dadkhah, she:
has worked as an open source analyst covering biodefense issues in Iran and Afghanistan, and as a data analyst for current coalition information operations in Afghanistan.
The first fluff sounds like an internship or research assistantship of some kind. The second… none of the IO operators I know would be remotely interested in publishing an op-ed in one of the most widely read newspapers in the world calling for more civilian deaths in Afghanistan. In fact, this is precisely the kind of thing they work hard to mitigate and counter.
-Shlok
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