Remember the days reading about all the Great Generals in history? We all know who they are; Alexander, Napoleon, Patton, Rommel, Genghis Khan and so on. Do we have the same caliber of generals running the U.S. military today? Why is it that so many people can see that the war in Iraq is being handled wrong on so many different fronts but no one can make the decisive decision to change the coarse of battle. Could it be that battle planning is being handed down from above the general’s heads as it was in Vietnam? One factor that all the great generals had to their advantage was total of troops and equipment. They were made to think on their feet. They had access each and every move they made from step one to the end.

Battlefield commanders of today are all given orders of what they are to do and told when and where to do it. One of last great generals of the U.S. military was Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. He knew his history when it came to war planning. I’ve never personally talked to him but I believe he used the same reasoning that another great U.S general used during the Civil War here in America. Stonewall Jackson believed that the "mystify, mislead and surprise" the enemy was the way to beat his foes. General Schwarzkopf applied this classic doctrine to defeat the 500,000-man Iraqi army in a hundred hours. While "fixing" the main Iraqi force in Kuwait in place by threatening an amphibious invasion from the gulf and by launching two U.S. Marine divisions and other forces directly on Kuwait, he sent two mobile corps nearly two-hundred miles westward into the Arabian Desert. These corps then swept around behind the Iraqi army, cutting off its line of supply and retreat to Baghdad and pressed it into a tight corner between the Euphrates River, the gulf and the marines advancing from the south. Iraqi soldiers surrendered by the thousands and resistance collapsed. Classic textbook planning.

I think the author Bevin Alexander put it best in his book How Great Generals Win when he said;

The purpose of every belligerent is to impose his will on his opponent. Trying to induce others to abide by one's wishes is a common human aim, applicable to individuals and groups as well as nations. The only distinction between ordinary human disputes and war is that war is an act of violence in which one side exerts force against the other side. If a side could attain its purpose without force it, of course, would do so, since no nation will attack unless there is resistance. For this reason the nineteenth-century Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of national policy by other means.

It may appear obvious that every individual, group and nation engaged in any conflict should always apply the policy of Paris in the Trojan War and strike only at the Achilles’ heel. Yet the history of human relations, as well as of war, shows conclusively that human beings more frequently ignore or do not see the opportunities for getting around an enemy or opponent and instead strike straight at the most obvious target they see.

So I call on everyone who wants to see Iraq come to a quick end to ask our true military leaders to stand up and put it on the table and do as your great generals before you did and think outside of the Washington Box.