April 01, 2003
Incompetence at the top
Posted by bopuc at April 1, 2003 03:39 PM
I don't know which is more impressive... Rumsfeld's arrogance and stupidty (and therefor the certainty of his defeat), or the fact that apparently, normally, an "embedded piece of the bureaucratic and operational culture " is essentailly a text document outline: the "TPFDL" (time-phased forces-deployment list). War by scripting? Makes sense, I guess.
I can see it now: over generations of military men (analysts), they develop a system (scripting language) which more or less does the trick. Along comes this arrogant wippersapper who figures he'd rather bootstrap the war and "hardcode it by hand". Oh and the R&D budget isn't what it used to be so...
Sheesh.