[Marxism] Fallon (was: RE: New Pearl Harbor)

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Fallon was head of the Navy in the Pacific when the incident with the
Chinese Sub and the U.S. carrier strike group happened. Fallon, contrary to
the spin in most of the media, portrayed it as no big deal and generally
stressed a policy of developing links with the Chinese military.

Fallon may well have had very practical objections to over-deployment of
naval assets in the Persian Gulf. They're basically absolutely no help
whatsoever in Iraq or Afghanistan, and supplying a carrier battle group is
no joke. Up to 10,000 more mouths to feed, and though the carrier might be
nuclear-propelled, nothing else is, and that means diesel and jet fuel by
the tanker load. It?s not a question of money, but of his logistics
apparatus which was already being stretched by the "surge". 

And as the commander of CentCom, unless he gets a direct order from the
civilian national command authority, i.e., the President or Sec. of Defense,
he has final say about deployments and operations in his theater. The job of
the Pentagon and the joint chiefs is to put together the units, train and
arm them, and organize the logisitics to the theater of operations. But even
the Joint Chiefs of Staff can't tell him what to do in Iraq or Afghanistan
or the Persian Gulf. So putting the crazies back in the box was also a
matter of defending his turf.

BTW, the policy change of establishing relations with the locals, which is
what has given some credence to the "surge" working, is parallel to his
stance on the Chinese thing and Iran. It really has nothing to do with the
escalation in the number of combat brigades.

Joaquín


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