Any Romance language, such as Spanish, is at least as difficult as English to learn, BTW. And in Europe, you ARE placed in there and made to learn pretty quick, like throwing a kid into the water and expecting them to instinctively dog-paddle, and it has been that way forever. "When in Rome...". I doubt it will be that stringent over here.

Eric, we DID let educators decide how to solve this problem. I've got to stress this. And what resulted was one of the biggest bureaucracies-in-a-bureaucracy that public education has ever seen (special education and sports being the only others of material comparable size). Shame on my fellow retired educators for letting this happen, AAMOF.

When you can show me someone within education who feels no ties or has no ties to protecting their own (lawyers and doctors, and NOW accountants have been afflicted with this, too), then they can decide it. And I'm a retired public school teacher saying this!

Yes, it was a grand experiment. It was what seemed proper and visionary at the time (and very, very, very tied into the political emancipation of Hispanics and the La Raza Unida movement). It has not worked, though, and it's time to pull the plug.

Now, a different experiment is being conducted. What's old is new again. Let's give it a chance, for gawd's sake. This is only fair, and I'm telling you, it's going to have to fail pretty bad to fail AS bad.

If I didn't spell it out above, I will now: what I am shaming my fellow retired educators (the ones in power) for was building and perpetuating a system to create a perceived necessary increased work force for teaching. It got to the point where the decisions were not about kids any more, but about educators and protecting jobs. At various times down the line, decisions could have been made to streamline and improve, but, no. Shame, shame, shame.

Spanish is the easiest, along with French, for us to learn, because it's so similar to English. The point I was making is, for us; that's who I was talking about. Compare that with Chinese, for gods sakes.

I remain skeptical that gestures and acting out is as good a method as having a teacher who knows both languages. But I don't really know; let the educators decide. Teachers (not necessarily administrators) should decide how to teach, not right-wing voters. That doesn't mean mistakes have not been made though.

I hope the teachers don't give the anti-bilingual initiatives forced on them "a chance" without adjusting things to their own situation in order to make it workable. Maybe in the interaction between the conservative voters and the educators, a better system will evolve.

So much needs to change in education. The whole system needs to be changed so that more creative interaction occurs among students in the classroom, and so the students learn to think and study and not just cram down things. I've seen the reports that show these new ways work. Going back to the way things were will not bring the change we all want to see. Nor pandering to peoples conservative prejudices, or using them to tear down the schools with privatization/vouchers.

Wow, so many people think the educators are to blame. Yes teachers have to fight to get enough money. I wonder why? Because they are given so little. Everyone knows they are underpaid, and are constantly bombarded with meaningless tests imposed by politicians that just get in the way of real teaching.

BTW, why is learning math in your native tongue, not workable, but learning math using a language you don't speak, IS workable? I could never quite get this.

_________________
Keep the Spirit Alive,
Eric Meece

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Eric A Meece on 2002-03-13 13:30 ]</font>

On 2002-03-13 13:26, Eric A Meece wrote:
Spanish is the easiest, along with French, for us to learn, because it's so similar to English.

Wow, Eric. I speak Spanish (Mexican, acually), French, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and some German and Persian (I had a weird childhood, okay? It relaxed me...). I'd say that German is by far the most similar to English. Even a non-speaker can make out what a person is saying a lot of the time if they speak slowly enough.


Believe it or not, Russian also has some pretty strong grammatical similarities with English. Its a language where someone with a smattering of knowledge can also pick up a lot of what is being said.


Of course, Romance languages as a whole are fairly simple for English speakers to learn, but I suspect that Spanish and French are not, by any stretch, the easiest to learn.

On 2002-03-13 16:12, Justin '77 wrote:

On 2002-03-13 13:26, Eric A Meece wrote:
Spanish is the easiest, along with French, for us to learn, because it's so similar to English.

Wow, Eric. I speak Spanish (Mexican, acually), French, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and some German and Persian (I had a weird childhood, okay? It relaxed me...). I'd say that German is by far the most similar to English. Even a non-speaker can make out what a person is saying a lot of the time if they speak slowly enough.


Believe it or not, Russian also has some pretty strong grammatical similarities with English. Its a language where someone with a smattering of knowledge can also pick up a lot of what is being said.


Of course, Romance languages as a whole are fairly simple for English speakers to learn, but I suspect that Spanish and French are not, by any stretch, the easiest to learn.

Not really surprising, given the findings of more recent study of linguistic relations within the Indo-European language family. Slavic (Russian), Baltic (Lithuanian), and Germanic (English and German) form what could be called the Northern Branch. Italic (Spanish and French) and Celtic make up a Western Branch. Indo-Iranian (Farsi) is, of course, an Eastern Branch. The relative ease of learning Italic languages for English speakers goes back as far as 1066 CE, with the Norman Conquest.

On 2002-03-13 13:26, Eric A Meece wrote:
Spanish is the easiest, along with French, for us to learn, because it's so similar to English.
[/quote]

On 2002-03-13 16:49, jds1958xg wrote:
Wow, Eric. I speak Spanish (Mexican, acually), French, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and some German and Persian (I had a weird childhood, okay? It relaxed me...). I'd say that German is by far the most similar to English. Even a non-speaker can make out what a person is saying a lot of the time if they speak slowly enough.

Amen! Quite true! Mr. Meece needs to learn a foreign language before he comments further here. And he never did explain how he learned English to begin with if he had no language to compare it with. :smile:

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SJ on 2002-03-13 19:08 ]</font>

On 2002-03-13 16:49, jds1958xg wrote:

Not really surprising, given the findings of more recent study of linguistic relations within the Indo-European language family. Slavic (Russian), Baltic (Lithuanian), and Germanic (English and German) form what could be called the Northern Branch. Italic (Spanish and French) and Celtic make up a Western Branch. Indo-Iranian (Farsi) is, of course, an Eastern Branch. The relative ease of learning Italic languages for English speakers goes back as far as 1066 CE, with the Norman Conquest.

As a pointless aside, I briefly dabbled in Athabascan (spoken in central/south-central Alaska and Yukon). That may have been one of the tougher languages I've encountered for native English speakers. I've heard that Basque is pretty tough, too ... but just try to find someone to teach it!

Just because the way babies learn is different from the way students learn, does not make it any better SJ

BTW SJ, are you an SJ?
((sounds like it))

FYI I studied Spanish and some German.

Eric

_________________
Keep the Spirit Alive,
Eric Meece

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Eric A Meece on 2002-03-13 20:09 ]</font>

Ok, so formally, our language has a Germanic (old english) vocab structure with an infusion of Latin vocab, but for me French grammar seems to make MUCH more sense than German grammar (i.e. the French grammar seems closer to English grammar ...)

I don't have a dog in this fight, but don't mind throwing a bone to the pack.

Several years ago I got involved in a discussion of language with a self proclaimed epistemologist. He made the argument that English was a singular language, due solely to the way it's been managed.

Almost all other languages have an absolute authority on what is and is not a part of the language. In many cases it's a government bureau; in others, an appendage of the "official" university. The official body produces an official dictionary, and that's that - no appeal to another authority. And heaven forbid that "unofficial" language gets validated.

He argued that, to the contrary, English has always been informal, and that is its strength. It has absorbed vocabulary and usage from any and all sources, and is approaching a true polyglot language.

I think his argument is a stretch, but show me another language that recognizes so many foreign words as part of the native tongue. Its a poor argument for English as the universal tongue, but it's probably a good reason why it has been so successful, to date. Of course, Latin also had its day.

On 2002-03-14 07:15, David '47 wrote:

show me another language that recognizes so many foreign words as part of the native tongue.

Japanese has a whole separate alphabet, hiragana (or is it katakana? I always mix those two terms), for what are translated as 'loan words'. Tons and tons of 'em, they have.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Justin '77 on 2002-03-14 07:25 ]</font>

4T: Anti Anti-War Crowd Dreams up a Disloyal Opposition. Neo-conic dreams made real.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Virgil K. Saari on 2002-03-14 08:06 ]</font>

By the way, I've been mulling this over for some time, and have come to suspect that, if S & H theory is at all useful, then we should still categorize post-9/11 days as still being in 3T.

I'm not 100% sure, but if forced to choose now, that's my choice.

Again, if S & H theory is useful, things will be clearer in decades hence.

I also am inclined to agree with those who say 3T didn't start as early as S & H propose. I think things fit better if you propose that it began around 1989-1990.

I think "catalysts" are overemphasised, but if I was forced to choose one, I'd choose the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War had a major impact on American thinking. By so thoroughly discrediting Communism, it significantly weakened the American Left, to such an extent that things would happen during the Clinton years that Reagan could have only dreamed of. Many arguments evaporated, and new ones took their place. For the first time in history, the number of nuclear weapons deployed sharply decreased, rendering a major pacifist issue much weaker. Arguments over lifestyles, personal viewpoints, and the virtues of various celebrities came to fore.

Internationally, the sudden emergence of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower started having repercussions as early as the Gulf War, and the ultimate effects are still playing out.

The end of the Cold War also caused a significant cutback in defense spending which caused profound shifts in our economy (ultimately forcing yours truly to abandon a career in physics). There was a sharp recession, a flurry of corporate restructuring, and high unemployment which lasted unusually long after the recovery had begun, but remarkably, the U.S. population put up with this with no major leftward drift, other than the election of a "New Democrat" who tried to distance himself from "liberalism".

Then came a subsequent leap in American productivity, followed by an economic boom, which, apparently, has a lot of life left in it.

One thing I'll be watching closely is levels of immigration. If this is a 4T, immigration levels should now drop dramatically.

Well, anyway, that's my viewpoint on this rather esoteric pursuit.

French and Spanish easy!? Mr Meece, have you ever lived in an environment where Spanish and English are half-n-half? I havelived in such a place for 11 years (the anniversary is tomorrow at 17:00) now and for what it is worth, Spanish and English have very fundamental differennces. I also used to live in Germany, so I have some German experience (ask Mr Patton). Just for kicks, I taught myself a little Welsh, too.

Spanish is a Latin language. Got to the source. Latin is from a different planet from English. Our verbs have no where near the amount of 'tenses'. The subject-verb-indirect object-direct object relationships are also very different.

Let us take a common slang phrase in English:

It sucks to be you

This cannot be translated word-for-word into Spanish: El chupa ser tu. It makes sense to English-speakers, but most Spanish speakers won't make heads or tails of it. Why? For starters, "it" is almost always used as a (in)direct object [in the San Antonio vernacular], never as subjects...and it goes on from there.

To communicate "it sucks to be you" in Spanish goes like this: "Tu chupas cuando sere ti" => "You suck when you are you"

English carries with it many assumptions that you know who you're taking about. Spanish requires clarification at every single verb. Spanish may flow out of the mouth better, but it is VERY constrictive to the near-chaotic-but-understandable English that we speak at these boards. Not to mention the inherent space ineffeciences that almost all other roman-alphabet-languages have.

German is perhaps as easy as any foreign language to learn, because it's the closest language to English. The words are very similar, the word orderings are closer than that of Spanish. The biggest problem with German is its verbs...the change from Sie form to du form never made sense to me.

My stance on the language issue is that the teacher can teach whatever language is appropriate to the region. In San Antonio, there can and should be an emphasis on Spanish, both conversational and business. But the idea of forcing kids to learn to something they don't need to learn sours me. One can get by just fine in San Antonio without Spanish. I assume there are many Canadians that can't speak French either, and little harm comes of it.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Chris Loyd '82 on 2002-03-14 09:48 ]</font>

On 2002-03-14 09:28, firemind wrote:

The end of the Cold War....significantly weakened the American Left....

For the first time in history, the number of nuclear weapons deployed sharply decreased....

The end of the Cold War also caused a significant cutback in defense spending....

heh heh. yeah, that stuff was a real blow to the left. :smile:


TK

President Bush found out in the newspaper tuesday of the INS issuing student visas to 2 known terrorist.This is yet another case of right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Sharing of imformation within the govt. seems to be minimal. INS will be the fall guy in this latest debacle. An investigation by Ashcroft and others will put the blame not on the lack of sharing imformation but problems within INS. Most likely INS will be put under Homeland Security and then will answer only to Tom Ridge and the president. Tom Ridge answers only to the president because he is an adviser not an actual cabinet member. We will definately see a decline of legal immigration.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nd boom '59 on 2002-03-14 10:03 ]</font>

On 2002-03-14 09:50, TrollKing wrote:

On 2002-03-14 09:28, firemind wrote:

The end of the Cold War....significantly weakened the American Left....

For the first time in history, the number of nuclear weapons deployed sharply decreased....

The end of the Cold War also caused a significant cutback in defense spending....

heh heh. yeah, that stuff was a real blow to the left. :smile:


TK

My post was longer than I intended and not as organized as it could have been, so I forgive you, but...

Primarily, I am listing reasons why the end of the Cold War had a major effect on American society. Not everything I wrote was intended to be an example of a "blow to the Left".

The primary blow to the Left was the intellectual discrediting of Communism, which rendered ridiculous those who (to this day) still hold up Cuba as a shining example of a great society. They're still there, but their numbers are fewer, and they seem totally ridiculous to most people. If you examine the rhetoric of the Left pre-1989, many still regarded the Soviet Union as at least morally equivalent to the United States, if not superior.

However, an ever-increasing defense budget and an ever-increasing number of nuclear weapons deployed did give the Left's arguments ammunition that was taken away when those trends suddenly reversed after 1989. The Right could say, "See, you were wrong about the military-industrial complex secretly ruling American society. The military contracters have fallen on hard times, laying off thousands of workers, and being forced to merge..."

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: firemind on 2002-03-14 10:05 ]</font>

On 2002-03-14 10:02, firemind wrote:

My post was longer than I intended and not as organized as it could have been, so I forgive you, but...

you forgive me? awww, thanks... :smile:

yeah, i know what your point was. i was just funnin' ya.

The primary blow to the Left was the intellectual discrediting of Communism, which rendered ridiculous those who (to this day) still hold up Cuba as a shining example of a great society. They're still there, but their numbers are fewer, and they seem totally ridiculous to most people. If you examine the rhetoric of the Left pre-1989, many still regarded the Soviet Union as at least morally equivalent to the United States, if not superior.

hmmm, interesting. i'm often a bit left of center, and pre-1989 i was significantly more so, but at no time did i ever think communism was a good plan. i guess i'm not part of whom you are speaking of.


TK

On 2002-03-14 10:01, nd boom '59 wrote:
President Bush found out in the newspaper tuesday of the INS issuing student visas to 2 known terrorist.This is yet another case of right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Sharing of imformation within the govt. seems to be minimal. INS will be the fall guy in this latest debacle. An investigation by Ashcroft and others will put the blame not on the lack of sharing imformation but problems within INS. Most likely INS will be put under Homeland Security and then will answer only to Tom Ridge and the president. Tom Ridge answers only to the president because he is an adviser not an actual cabinet member. We will definately see a decline of legal immigration.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nd boom '59 on 2002-03-14 10:03 ]</font>

Having had personal experience with the incredibly inept bureacracy known as the INS when my wife an I were adopting babies from foreign lands, I can tell you that things at the INS are absolutely as bad as you hear, if not worse.

I don't want to get started here, but I'll give you some hints:

Nothing ever happens until you complain repeatedly.

Vital documents sent by the INS to the wrong offices, never to be found again.

INS phone lines that are never, ever answered.

Warnings received in the mail that our children would be deported due to the INS having lost documents. Wife reduced to tears. Consider buying a gun.

Staff at office of Congressional representative who chuckle and roll their eyes as soon as you mention the INS.

INS phone lines that are never, ever answered.

Requirements that one-year-olds be "interviewed" to confirm that they are not terrorists. (This is pre 9/11, mind you.)

Advice that you never change your address during the years attempting to secure US citizenship for adopted children, lest the INS use that as an excuse to screw something else up

Congress passes law granting automatic citizenship to babies legally adopted by US citizens, sans-INS involvement.

Miraculous change in INS behavior before law takes effect. Suddenly, everything is in order, please come to INS office, get citizenship the old way (involving fees paid to INS). Go along just to get it over with. Put citizenship papers in very, very safe place.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: firemind on 2002-03-14 10:26 ]</font>

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0203/15/o.../opinion4.html

Very interesting article that might seem to show that Australia is near a 4T

Good grief, firemind, that's horrible! And I believe every word.

firemind writes,
"Primarily, I am listing reasons why the end of the Cold War had a major effect on American society."

I believe, for reason too numerous to mention, that the third turn occured closer to this point than 1984. And that the first turn occured closer to when the cold war began than 1946. Truman, for all intents and purposes, mirrored Reagan: The former deciding to begin the cold war and the latter for ending it.

One can almost look at the elections of 1952 and 1992 in the same light. 1952 = Consenus of the "Vital Center" Whereas 1992 = Unraveling of what was left of the "Vital Center.

Though I would never, ever expect a red-blooded liberal to agree with me on this. :smile:



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Marc Lamb on 2002-03-14 14:07 ]</font>

Che Guevara... Looked like Jesus.

Rich, American college-age lefty gals loved this guy in the late sixties.

Quickest way for a rich, American college-age, lefty guy to get laid in the late sixties: Know how to talk like, and about, Che Gueara with rich, American college-age gals.

Mission accomplished. :smile:


p.s. Does this hold true in Australia, Tristan?

On 2002-03-14 15:21, Marc Lamb wrote:



Che Guevara... Looked like Jesus.

Rich, American college-age lefty gals loved this guy in the late sixties.

Quickest way for a rich, American college-age, lefty guy to get laid in the late sixties: Know how to talk like, and about, Che Gueara with rich, American college-age gals.

Mission accomplished. :smile:


p.s. Does this hold true in Australia, Tristan?

If anyone is interested in a fictional account of the last years of Mr. Guevara's revolutionary career, at least from the point of view of his foes, there's a novel out now called "Special Ops" by W.E.B. Griffin.
In the novel the decision is made by LBJ and the CIA deliberately to not assassinate Guevara, but instead to undermine his efforts to overthrow African governments. They felt that it was preferable to humiliate him instead of turn him into a Socialist martyr.
Although this is a work of fiction, I have a strong hunch that there is a lot of truth in the story. It also is definitely not a flattering portrayal of "Che".

This article seems to show a change in military thinking from the so-called Powell Doctrine, which reflects Artist leadership in the Military. Towards a military doctrine which reflects Prophet leadership of the armed forces. The article seems to show senior military officers much more cautious than their juniors.

This is from the latest issue of the New Republic.

HOW THE ARMY DITCHED THE POWELL DOCTRINE.
Troop Movement
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Post date 03.14.02 | Issue date 03.25.02 [Email this article.] E-mail this article

Last week, in the middle of the Battle of Gardez, theater commander Army General Tommy Franks expressed his condolences to the families of American soldiers who lost their lives "in our ongoing operations in Vietnam." It was a strange slip. In truth, recent ground operations in Afghanistan have had exactly the opposite resonance: Never in the past 30 years has the specter of Vietnam been further from the minds of American military planners. The involvement of sizable numbers of conventional Army forces in sustained combat is a remarkable development in itself, one not seen since the Gulf war. More remarkable still was the sheer audacity of the effort--which involved helicopters operating at maximum altitudes; regular Army forces from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions battling Al Qaeda fighters at close range; and Army commanders improvising as they went along. The officers who planned the operation at Gardez weren't reliving Vietnam. They were banishing it.

From its inception, Operation Anaconda was very much an Army product. The initial plan for rooting out Al Qaeda and Taliban forces that had regrouped in the caves of eastern Afghanistan was drafted by General Franklin Hagenbeck of the Army's 10th Mountain Division. From there it was passed up to Central Command's land component commander, Army Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek, before landing on Franks's desk. The decision to rely heavily on regular Army forces has stirred considerable speculation. An article last week in The Washington Times provoked an uproar at the Pentagon by quoting an accusation (from what sounded like an Air Force officer) that an "Army mafia" was pressing for the use of conventional forces on parochial grounds. That is, having sat out every American combat action since Somalia (including most of the war in Afghanistan), the Army felt it couldn't afford to sit out another.

That's not quite right. In fact, the original request for the plan came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after intelligence indicated an Al Qaeda buildup back in January--only one month after Tora Bora, where America's reliance on Afghan proxies allowed much of the enemy to escape. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Richard Myers flew all the way to Afghanistan to review the plan, and the president himself approved it. Still, the allegation contained a kernel of truth: Army leaders did want their troops in the fight. And, given the Army's institutional trajectory over the past decade, that itself is news. Good news.



[T] he Army's eagerness to play a role in Afghanistan derives, in part, from the reality of a war being fought in self-defense. But it also reflects the accumulation of past experiences. First, of course, there was Vietnam. The "lessons of Vietnam" usually conjure up a reflexive opposition to military intervention on the part of civilian policymakers. But nowhere was the Vietnam syndrome felt more deeply than among the post-Vietnam officer corps, particularly in the Army, which bled the most in Southeast Asia. The understandable reluctance to repeat the experience yielded, among other things, the restrictive doctrine for the use of force popularized by Colin Powell, the most powerful Army general of the post-Vietnam era. Many would later invoke the Powell Doctrine's strict "national interest" criteria to explain the Army's reluctance to intervene in places like Bosnia and Kosovo. But it's worth remembering that Powell argued that the defense of Kuwait didn't meet the criteria either.

After the first President Bush launched the war nonetheless, he declared that the United States had finally "licked the Vietnam syndrome." But, for senior Army officials, America's liberation of Kuwait only reinforced it. Operation Desert Storm, which was designed to minimize the risk to U.S. ground troops, set a nearly impossible standard for an already cautious Army leadership. As a result, recalls author and retired Army Colonel Ralph Peters, "After Desert Storm, Army generals carried force protection [i.e., safeguarding one's own troops] to extremes." And when they failed to meet the Gulf war standard two years later in Somalia, where the loss of 18 American soldiers elicited a public outcry and prompted President Clinton to abandon the mission, the Army brass grew even more risk-averse. Indeed, Clinton's preoccupation with casualties only encouraged an existing ethos that equated them with failure.

It surfaced again during the mid-1990s when Army generals argued against putting troops on the ground in Bosnia. When U.S. troops finally did set foot in the Balkans in 1995, the Army kept them on a short leash, openly declaring that their primary mission was force protection. Not surprisingly, a massive survey conduced by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies during Clinton's second term (the results of which will be included in a forthcoming book by Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi) found that military officers were far more casualty-averse than their civilian counterparts; that senior officers were more casualty-averse than junior officers; and that senior Army officers were among the most casualty-averse of all.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Kosovo. When President Clinton declared: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war," Army leaders proved eager to oblige--even after his resistance to the idea softened. The most memorable example came when Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer opposed General Wesley Clark's request to employ Apache helicopter gunships against Serb forces. According to The Washington Post, Reimer "worried that the Army's Apaches would be a step toward the use of ground forces, something the Army leadership did not favor." And indeed, when Clinton ultimately authorized the dispatch of 24 Apaches to Albania, the Army dragged its feet--taking one month to deliver them, and then only in the company of more than 5,000 Army personnel, 15 tanks, a mechanized infantry company, an engineer company, and an air-defense battery. None were ever used. The saga embarrassed the United States and humiliated the Army. Of his service's performance in Kosovo, then-Army Secretary Louis Caldera remarked, "We seem to be more willing to suffer casualties in training than in real operations."

The Army's marginal role in Kosovo proved to be, if not a turning point, at least an opening for institutional selfcriticism. The problem in Kosovo was not a lack of capability but, as retired Colonel Richard Hart Sinnreich put it recently in Army magazine, "the mental processes of some of its senior leaders." Adds former Army officer and Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, "Among the more perceptive leaders of the officer corps, it was becoming evident as early as Bosnia that having an Army unwilling to take risks is pointless." The Kosovo embarrassment brought these fights into the open, spurring a serious debate in the Pentagon about whether the Army was even relevant anymore.

With this debate came an opportunity to revisit Army doctrine. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (who replaced Reimer in 1999), along with his deputy, General John Keane, seized upon the Army's failure in Kosovo to unveil a plan to transport Army forces to combat theaters within 96 hours and to begin the process of transforming heavy armor units into lighter brigades. "When ordered," Shinseki says, "we intend to get to trouble spots faster than our adversaries can complicate the crisis." Pointing to the vulnerability of these lighter brigades, critics within the Army have derided Shinseki's vision as a recipe for significant casualties--an argument bolstered by recent Army war games. But while the plan's particulars may be subject to debate, the rationale behind it is not. Army leaders, after all, are now talking openly about the imperative of getting to war zones rather than staying out of them. "Soldiers from rapid deployment units tend to be risk-takers and aggressive," says Robert Killebrew, a former Army colonel and one of its most innovative thinkers. "And as the Army moves toward a lighter, more mobile structure, it will begin to look and think the same way."

September 11, then, may have been what Peters calls an "accelerator" for a process that was already underway, with many Army leaders having openly acknowledged that putting troops on the ground only as a last resort and then subordinating their mission to force protection undercut the Army's own mission. But Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and a career artillery officer, wasn't one such leader. Consequently, the evolution of the Army's involvement in Afghanistan over the past five months has closely mirrored the evolution of Army thinking over the past five years--from excessive caution, to embarrassment, to a more robust stance.

According to officers at Central Command and on the Army Staff--as well as civilian policymakers--Franks's early stewardship of the war was characterized by tentativeness. Among other things, he initially proposed a days-long air campaign confined to the suppression of Taliban air defenses; declined for weeks to use the JSTARS surveillance aircraft (an essential tool in the U.S. arsenal that illuminates enemy activity over a wide area on radar); sought legal counsel before targeting Taliban leader Mullah Omar (who escaped in the meantime); and his team turned down a request for air support from imperiled opposition leader Abdul Haq (who was quickly captured and killed). During the first months of the war, instances of excessive caution like these regularly became the centerpiece of twice-daily telephone conversations between Rumsfeld, Myers, and Franks--during which Rumsfeld often had to prod Franks to be more aggressive. And when Franks chose to deploy Marines to landlocked Afghanistan ahead of the Army, senior members of his own service began to echo Rumsfeld's concerns.

No operation provoked more second-guessing than the December assault on Tora Bora, where Franks relied on a combination of Afghan proxies and small numbers of Special Operations Forces. The mix wasn't right. The Afghan troops, whose aims no longer coincided with our own, proved less eager to comb the caves of Tora Bora than they were to smuggle Al Qaeda members across the border. The operation embarrassed everyone involved: Central Command, which devised it; Rumsfeld's team, which endorsed it; and the Army, which could have played a valuable role but, aside from fielding Special Forces teams, played none.

Nonetheless, the Bush team's unflinching support for the war effort has emboldened ground forces. Hence, while the initiative for putting Army troops into Gardez came from Rumsfeld, Army sources say Franks adapted quickly to the new strategy as well as to the surprises and last-minute tactical imperatives of the battle itself. As the war in Afghanistan extends into its fifth month, the Army's institutional reflexes are rapidly yielding to operational requirements. But the Army's performance also reflects a gradual erosion of the old verities. "The idea that some element of risk-taking is a punishable offense has been losing stock for years," says one mid-level officer. "The aggressiveness you see in [Gardez] is a symptom of that." Indeed, critics may fault the Army for its tactics in Gardez, but they can hardly accuse it of avoiding risks. And in the end, that may prove even more significant than the outcome of the operation itself. "There probably never should have been a debate about putting forces on the ground [in Afghanistan]," says Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, "but if there was, Gardez has put it to rest." Hopefully forever.