Military Leaders Make Weak Advisers

[tannybogus]

History shows civilian leaders are better off ignoring advice of generals.

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In October 1950, for example, President Harry S. Truman traveled to Wake Island to meet with MacArthur, the commander of the forces in Korea, to ascertain whether the U.S. military's headlong rush to the Yalu would provoke China to intervene. MacArthur assured him it would not, and predicted that the war would be over by Christmas. One month later, the Chinese launched a massive attack on the advancing, widely dispersed U.S. forces and sent them reeling back into South Korea.

MacArthur then advised Truman to attack the Chinese mainland with nuclear weapons, and surge hundreds of thousands more U.S. troops into the theater. In January 1951, MacArthur referred to the war in Korea as a crusade. He said that in Korea, Washington was fighting for a free Asia. Fortunately, Truman realized that Europe was the central front in the Cold War. He fired MacArthur and began negotiations with North Korea that ultimately restored the status quo ante bellum.

In 1954, when the French asked for U.S. assistance to bail them out against the North Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu, Adm. Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or CJCS, pushed hard for U.S. involvement and recommended attacking the North Vietnamese forces with nuclear weapons. President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead sent an envoy to Paris to work out the partition of Vietnam.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his fellow chiefs urged President John F. Kennedy to launch a full scale invasion of Cuba. We now know this would have produced a nuclear attack on the United States. Kennedy wisely chose a quarantine and sent his brother, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, to negotiate with the Soviet Union. His Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, had to intervene with the chief of Naval operations, Adm. George Anderson, to prevent the Navy from actually firing on Soviet ships.
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http://www.truthout.org/article/military-leaders-make-weak-advisers

But McCain said Petraeus was one of the greatest generals!(Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight)

:shrug: