"The extra soldiers and Marines ... will prepare the forces for missions in areas besides Iraq and Afghanistan ... I believe we're a nation at war. I think that Afghanistan and Iraq represent the first battles of this long war ... this war against Islamic extremists."

These guys are Big Army. They just don't seem to understand that the "long war" is 5% brawn and 95% brain. From the QDR:

Finally, by emphasizing greater cultural awareness and language skills, the QDR acknowledges that victory in this long war depends on information, perception, and how and what we communicate as much as application of kinetic effects.

Nor do they seem to realize that the forces are more effective when deployed in small numbers for focused, low intensity missions. From Robert Kaplan in 2005:

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

This latest testimony is rich with meaningless buzzwords and jargon:

"... the proper slope ..."

"... whether or not we should look at off-ramping [2, 3]..."

SEC. RUMSFELD: Once we started --

LT GEN RENUART: It started much earlier than that --

SEC. RUMSFELD: -- Earlier than that, in terms of the timing and the preparation and all of that. And then we said, okay, should there be some on-ramps or off-ramps if you need to add somehow. And they did. They came back with some --

LT GEN RENUART: Off-ramps.

SEC. RUMSFELD: -- off-ramps, we called them.

"We can't do it by keeping shooting behind the ducks ... We have to get ahead of the program ..."

"These additional Marines will allow us the additional ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]