How this guy got to be a professor of anything is beyond me....

This video clip describes how I feel reading the latest tripe from Bacevich.  And you know, there is never a sock full of horse manure around when you need one.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to a global counterinsurgency campaign. Instead of fighting an endless hot war in a vain effort to eliminate the jihadist threat, the United States should wage a cold war to keep the threat at bay. Such a strategy worked before. It can work again.

Where oh where do I begin?

#1. Endless global counterinsurgency? Bullshit. The COIN campaign is hardly global; its focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan - and only certain regions of Pakistan. How he gets "global" from that I don't know. If he's referring to Iraq then maybe he didn't notice a salient fact about Iraq: we won.

#2. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger "what's the number for the Islamic world"? I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize on behalf of America to Muslims around the world. Please know that many non-Muslims in the U.S. are non-the-less informed about Islam and we understand that the very idea of an "Islamic world" is offensive and that there is at least as much diversity of opinion about the nature of the relationship between God and man within Islam as there is within Christianity. Sorry.

#3. The high tech American way of war is discredited? If by discredited you mean so successful that the U.S. took down Iraq in 3 weeks and has achieved such a lead in kinetic capability that there is no one in the world even building a force to compete with us, then yes, discredited is a good word. Seriously, when was the last time anybody had the guts to send a fighter against an F-15? When was the last time anybody had the guts to challenge our sea power? We are fucking these dudes up with killer robots. Got it? We don't even have to waste the time to send a human anymore, we'll send a Terminator to get you. And that's what this guy calls discredited? The only problem with our military capability has been that we have won wars way too fast for our military civil-affairs and civilian aid agencies to catch up. But that capability is improving.

#4. What role did "containment" play in the Cold War, anyway? I would say exploiting fissures within the "communist world" was at least as effective, and maybe more effective, than "containment".

#5. Decapitating strikes. Right. We did that in the 1990s and now there's a big hole in the New York skyline. My single biggest beef with this strategy is this: what did we lack in our strikes against AQ leadership in the 1990s? Actionable intelligence. What did we lack against Iraq in 2003? Actionable intelligence. How do you get intelligence? You have to build relationships on the ground. The Taliban, which hides AQ, is a primarily Pashtun insurgency that hides among a Pashtun population. To find the Taliban we have to engage with the Pashtun people, and the only way they are going to trust us enough to talk is if they know we can protect them from the Taliban.

#6. Perfect our society for competition? Will somebody get this guy a copy of The World is Flat? This guy was in the army for how long and he never noticed they have T.V. in other countries? People in the Gap WANT the connectivity - the Takffaris want to sever the connection. Besides, there is NO poverty in America when compared with the poverty in Afghanistan.

The really scary thing about this article is that there are kids at Boston University whose only exposer to IR or American foreign policy is going to be the class they take from him. I feel bad for those kids.