Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Robert Gates and the Playoffs.

Many of my readers watched the playoff game between the Forty-Niners and the Seattle Seahawks. Football is a simplistic model from which we can infer truths in the murky complexity that surrounds the fog of war and politics.

In that playoff game we saw two teams of equal talent hungry for victory. The game went back and forth until the final seconds. With time running out the Forty-Niner's quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, threw the perfect pass to the end zone. Both Michael Crabtree and Richard Sherman were racing down the field as the pass followed its slow and inexorable trajectory. It looked like Crabtree would make the catch when at the last second Sherman deflected it away. For an instant victory and defeat hung suspended by the slimmest of margins and then the game was “decided.”

Hold that thought! Was the game really decided on that final play? Each team had about fifty (50) offensive and defensive plays that preceded the finale. Is it reasonable to praise or blame the field goal kicker, or in this case, Kaepernick or Sherman, for the final play in a long series of defensive and offensive exchanges? The answer is emphatically NO! As any football coach will tell you there are many opportunities that decide a contest and not just the last one with time running out. It’s human nature to remember that last one… it has a way of sticking in your mind, but it’s the collective weight of all the plays that really decides the outcome.

To his credit Robert Gates moved with relentless energy to get the Army to develop vehicles that could survive an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). However an IED, like the last play in a football game, is but the final link in a chain of causation. As he looked at those wounded warriors and wrote letters to the families of soldiers killed in action the vision of an exploding vehicle is what seems to have been foremost in his mind. If I push myself I can come up with at least a dozen links in the chain that preceded an exploding vehicle, any one of which might have prevented this regrettable outcome.

We did the same thing in the aftermath of 911. We focused on airplane hijackings and airport security rather than on all the other links that led up to the attack on the Twin Towers.

I’m not picking on the SECDEF, a public servant I hold in the highest esteem. Nor am I overly critical of the other players who had opportunities to mitigate these tragedies. I blame the process that doesn’t look back at the “films” and focuses instead on the last play in the game. Only by looking at each link will we ultimately figure out the best way to wage an effective counterinsurgency in the war on terrorism.