Also, the worst dialogue I’ve heard this side of a George Lucas flick.

Less than 10 minutes into Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Day, and I’m rewarded with this gem (amongst others).  Updates to follow if the film warrants.

What the events of the last ten years have demonstrated is that a drawly Southern Republican and a clipped Northern Democrat will substantively govern in the same manner, engage the same means, and pursue the same ends.

-IOZ

This is true.  There is, effectively, zero difference between McCain and Obama on foreign policy, aside from, perhaps, the tone.  Sure, Obama bows to foreign leaders, and I can understand the disgust with that, but…meh.  Show me how that changes things in my life.  McCain would also be promising drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, if only to save his party from further disaster in the midterms.  Sure, the numbers might be different, but that’s only noteworthy if you are up for deployment, related to someone who’s up for deployment, or have a contract to supply goods and services to people on deployment.

Likewise, domestically, the differences would be subtle.  Would McCain not have introduced some form of health-care reform that kept in place all of the insurance companies, but regulated them more heavily?  Here, again, the differences are that, perhaps, there would not have been an individual mandate and, certainly, there would be fewer cries of socialism.  But, in the end, the McCain Health Care Bill would probably look an awful lot like the Obama Health Care Bill.  And let’s not get started on the Big Oil Spill, which, aside from McCain’s ability to lose his temper, would not have played out any differently than it did regardless of who was in office.

And yet, contra my thesis, politics do matter, if only because these small differences have the ability to produce great variances in results over the long-term (see, e.g., Supreme Court Justices).  So I guess elections do matter, even if the things we actually fight over (Elizabeth Warren) are irrelevant.

Seriously, I played a match a few weeks ago where one of the players had 54 kills and 3 deaths.  That shouldn’t happen.  It wasn’t a fun round for me, and I was on his team!  Fix your fucking matchmaking, IW.

Work’s basic point was that the Marines will re-orient towards a sea-based power projection part of the military, moving away from the “second land army” role that they have taken on in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, he seemed to shrink from any suggestion that doing so would actually compromise their ability to function as a second land army/counterinsurgency force/heavy infantry corps.  Thus, I got to hear talk about how the Marines would get “lighter,” shedding 10,000 vehicles from their stocks, while at the same time increasing the amount of equipment available for deployment.  I heard that the Marines will continue to emphasize their ability to conduct amphibious assaults, but only with 2 of their brigade combat teams.  In short, I was left unsure whether the overall strategy was to re-orient the entire Corps, or just feint back towards the sea-based roots of the force while actually continuing to try to provide everything to everyone.

Lest I be accused of being unfair to Mr. Work and Lt. Gen. Flynn, however, I will say that they are speaking about strategies that are still in progress.

I’ll defer to Greg Grant on whether the speech signaled that the EFV program is in deep trouble.  I didn’t hear that the same way he did, but he’s been doing this a lot longer and probably reads between the lines better than I do.  I would caution, however, against reading too much into the speech.

Backstory here.

However, assuming that most Americans have not been paying detailed attention to Afghanistan, the documents are important in that they give the media license to show fighting in Afghanistan.  The media is usually hamstrung by a lack of ability to make this case clearly — administration officials are, of course, unwilling to speak about the problems, and few people who think that Afghanistan will not improve have been to the country recently, making them difficult to pin a story on.  This, by contrast, offers proof that all is not well in Denmark, and the media is seizing that opportunity to make the case (much as l’affaire McChrystal provided a similar opportunity).  Even better, it offers a shadowy villain in the form of the Pakistani ISI, meaning that the story doesn’t even have to offend U.S. readers.

So this does not “demolish” COIN strategy.  In fact, this shows little or nothing that was not already known (and it would be foolish to take a smattering of on-the-ground reports and establish some sort of grand criticism from it…that takes far more analysis than anyone has been able to devote to these documents yet).  Rather, like Restrepo, this tells us a little bit more about the feel of the ground in Afghanistan, and puts our attention there once more.