"We Kind of Need to Do it Like the Romans Used to Do It"

Lt. General Kellogg's senescent thesis on Fox News overlooks the fact that the Romans never conquered the Persian homeland, only western Persia in present day Iraq.

An old friend with a distinguished career as a Naval aviator once told that the closer you get to being a flag officer in the Navy or a general in the Army, the more of a political animal you have to be. Thus, the process of ascending the ranks tends to select men who are willing to conform to political imperatives and tell egoistic politicians what they want to hear.

One of the most famous disputes in military history was between Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

In the years 1939-1940, Halder tried hard to persuade Hitler that the goal of invading and destroying the Soviet Union was unachievable. Halder later second-guessed himself enough to participate in the planning of Operation Barbarossa, but by the end of 1941, he realized that his initial instinct had been correct.

He then advised Hitler in the winter of 1942 to pull the Wehrmacht back into a defensive position rather than continuing to take so many losses in the winter offensive, but Hitler refused to listened to him and fired him in September 1942. Ultimately, around 3 million German soldiers died on the Eastern Front and another 1 million died in Soviet POW camps.

This morning a friend sent me the following clip of Lt. General Keith Kellogg on Fox News.

I wonder if General Kellogg is aware of the fact that the Romans never came close to conquering the Persian homeland (modern day Iran), whose capital was Persopolis.

During the 2nd century AD Trajan, Lucius Verus, and Septimus Severus had fleeting successes conquering the western Persian city of Ctesiphon, which lies about twenty-five miles southeast of present day Bagdad.

American forces engaged Iraqi forces around the archeological remains of this ancient city in 1991 and 2003. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the archeological site was badly neglected. It’s a great irony that Saddam’s government maintained Iraqi’s ancient heritage sites and protected the country’s ancient Christian congregations, unlike his successor regime installed by the United States.

The Roman legions greatly feared Parthian archers, especially after the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC (near the present day city of Harran, Turkey), in which Parthian mounted archers destroyed the morale and cohesion of Roman heavy infantry. The mounted archers unleashed their famous “Parthian shot"—that is, feigning retreat while shooting backward—which the Romans found extremely surprising and frustrating.

Parthian arrows were bad enough back then, but they don’t compare to missiles and drones equipped with high explosives.

Lt. General Kellogg’s casual and thoughtless exhortation that “we kind of need to do it like the Romans used to do it” may be the dumbest thing a senior military commander of a great power has ever said.