Originally Posted by Jack S.

Thank you for your input. I will admit, I am ignorant in the ways of the Afghan people. I would say that that country is ruled by short-sighted fools, if you wanted my frank opinion. The violence has to end at some point, maybe not in the next few years (or decades), but at some time law and order must prevail. I understand that this has been the way of these people for quite some time and some idealistic lout such as myself isn't going to change anything, however, if we continue to deal with problems there as they do, what does that say of us? Of the West?

My opinions, however, are born of ignorance. This in itself invalidates them. Thank you again for your input, you've given me much to think about.



He explicitly told us to not give his name or his information without his written permission. The course was titled "Modern Military History."

From what I gleaned of his lectures: he defined strategy as the 'why,' operations as the 'what,' and tactics as the 'how.' He also put emphasis on the fact that a true plan would need a balance of all of these things. My interpretation of his saying: 'managing violence,' is having the 'what' and the 'how' without the 'why.' Tactics cannot be implemented without operational context, and operational context cannot be obtained without a reason, or strategy.

We mainly covered conventional wars. He didn't discuss unconventional warfare too much. He argued that there wasn't enough historical data to give a proper conceptual presentation on UW without missing something important. We covered Vietnam, Korea and Desert Storm only very briefly. We spent most of class time on both world wars and the political, economic, and social circumstances that led to them.