When I was a man-child (thank you, Mr Waters) my mother found a copy of Playboy and was scandalized, although I protested that I preferred the articles to the pictures. I still live in the same alternate universe and make a daily visit to Swedish Meatballs to learn something new, reading the articles rather than the pictures.

Effwit picks up the proverbial thematic and discusses the serial military disasters of the Bu$h malAdministration as exemplified by the Tillman killing, and ties a neat bow around the empty package of The Greatest Military in the World™ by showing how propaganda public perception has surpassed military skill in achieving results by citing an ongoing series by Stan Goff.

Many readers here are probably familiar with the fact that perception management activities suddenly become necessary after an unanticipated politically sensitive event such as the death of CPL Pat Tillman.

Stan Goff -- in the first part of a three-part series -- argues that it was the Pentagon's institutional emphasis upon domestic influence that led to decisions on the ground that resulted in Tillman's death itself.

The context for everything that happened after Pat's death requires this Pentagon propaganda-emphasis be center stage. Some people already understand this. What is not well understood is that this propaganda-emphasis likely played a central role in creating the conditions for Pat's death in the first place. Let me give that special emphasis, too:[emph added]

Awake observers have long understood that everything the Bu$h people do, every decision, initiative, proposal, program and public statement is done with no other thought than that of domestic political consumption. When your primary goal is the consolidation of domestic political power and the complete marginalization of political opponents so as to create a 21st century thousand-year-reich, it matters little what the peasantry in other countries think. The only concern is the fealty of the media to enable your lies. Why would anyone be surprised that the military would be susceptible to such a corrosive environment? They’re already pre-disposed to insularity by virtue of maintaining a culture within a culture. Civilians – the taxpayers, let me remind you, their employers – are to be avoided, to be suspicious of. The Enemy Within. And with the widening cultural chasm developing because of the Republican Party’s deliberate politics of destruction, that enemy is Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, and more and more, non-evangelical Christians and others. We dress differently, cut our hair differently, think differently and hence are dangerous.

One of the ostensible reasons Pat Tillman died is because his platoon leader, faced with an unexpected event, violated one of the prime dicta of military thought. His platoon was tasked to reach an objective by a specific time point. When one of the HumVees in the convoy broke down, he split his force, planning to defend the disabled vehicle with one part, and sending the other part on ahead to complete the mission. There is a record that he contacted “higher higher” to advise them of the problem and that the mission parameters would have to be changed.

Goff:

The decision to split the Blacksheep Platoon on April 22 was forced on a platoon leader who stated to his superiors that splitting the platoon in this terrain would require a half-assed preparation cycle and potentially create a dangerous break in inter-platoon communications. This directive was designed with one purpose in mind: to be able to state that the platoon had reached their "target" on time. A timeline (a bureaucratic checklist) drove this decision -- not the intelligence. The push to provide evidence of "progress" in Afghanistan -- using the Rumsfeldian "metrics" of quantification -- as a counterweight to the bad news from the Fallujah-Najaf rebellions and the breaking Abu Ghraib scandal, created the sense of urgency throughout military commands there to send reports confirming that X number of missions were completed in X amount of time. [emph added]

It was more important to “prove” that we were winning by presenting some statistics than to consider soldiers’ lives.

There’s a great deal of “inside baseball” in the Goff article which highlights just how our military has morphed into Billy Crystal’s “Fernano Lamas” character from Saturday Night Live.

“It is better to look good than to feel good.”

Briefly: Only “outstanding” officers and EM are worthy of promotion, and while on the Planet Earth one might find one in 30 or 40 to be outstanding, within our military the ratio is apparently somewhat lower, notwithstanding the “up or out” policy which has probably been put to death since the Iraq qWagmire. In this promotion program a soldier’s previous six months or one year are quantified by his supervisor (“rater”) and compared to all the other officers under that rater’s supervision. Missing any command-designated target can be a career-killer.

Thus, the stage was set for poor Lieutenant Blacksheep Platoon Leader to be pressured to split his force in Injun Country, and to cause CPL Tillman’s section to be ambushed. There’s much more to learn, and it would be time well-spent.

I look forward to Goff’s followup articles, and might well have something more to say about the disgraceful state of the World’s Greatest Military Power.™