ObamaDare -- The Doctrine of the Ranger Ladies

If I’m right about what will be the Obama Doctrine once he’s given up on us, the inclusion of women into combat will occur by November, regardless of whether the leadership of the forces agrees or not. The Lady Rangers will become all they deserve to be. And it will be a huge symbolic reflection of the most important decisions he’s made to date. His initiative is to change the American fighting strategy from the inside moving out, and I agree with him.

Rather than ending the wars and conflicts the US is involved in -- and, out of technological necessity, evolving into drone tactics -- he is opting to fix the internal injustices of the machines behind our wars. If he can do that by installing/instilling equality and interpersonal humanity into the ranks, the armed troops of the future will be better than they are today. And we may no longer have to use the  “Axis of Evil” mentality that has driven the world against us everywhere (i.e., terror, anti-Americanism).

By daring to question and force operational changes, Obama started massive transformations of ideology inside the rigid male universe of fighting. But he couldn’t do that and give away all his chips by also unilaterally ceasing the wars that Reagan started and Bush, out of ill informed bravado, exacerbated. So rather than ordering a wholesale end of hostilities (and closing Gitmo, etc.), he traded that authority for other forms of compliance -- including letting women, LGBT, gender justice inside.

Obama coulda, woulda, perhaps shoulda done it differently in a perfect, dictatorial world. Since he couldn’t, he went for a tradeoff, accepting a philosophical shift first. Having achieved that, his legacy will be sound and -- with any luck -- the next, female Commander-in-Chief will have a foundation to correct the damage done by decades of foolish old-fashion war.

In selecting this route, Obama required that we continue for too long the hurt that is still in place. I think the Iran agreement is a logical extension of his ObamaDares ideas. Nuclear war, after all, is a dead concept. It’s better to build better soldier systems for future conflicts, even at the cost of keeping in place the errors of the past.