Military Planners OUT at The New York Times!

From the New York Times editorial yesterday, opining on Obama’s speech about Afghanistan troop withdrawal plans:

He said that 10,000 of the 33,000 troops from the “surge” would come home before the end of this year, with the rest out by next summer. He vowed that reductions would continue “at a steady pace” after that, and that “the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security” by sometime in 2014.

We are not military planners, so we won’t play the too big/too small numbers game.

Where did the military planners go?!? They were definitely still there as of 7 years ago (from November 2004 editorial):

So if Mr. Bush intends to keep American troops in Iraq until his stated aims are achieved, he must face up to the compelling need to increase their strength, and to commit the resources needed to give present policies at least some chance of success. That would require a minimum of two additional combat divisions, or nearly 40,000 more American troops, beyond the just over 140,000 currently planned for the Iraqi election period.

The cynical interpretation is that the New York Times editorial board fired its military planners when Obama took office, figuring they’d no longer be necessary now that the best military planner of them all is the Commander-in-Chief. A more generous interpretation is that they just resigned.

Unfortunately for us readers, the lack of military planners makes for much less interesting editorials – now all the editorial board can muster is a critique of the speech Obama made (it was too short!, they complained), rather than a critique of the strategy outlined in the speech.

I certainly hope the editorial board’s health care planners, immigration planners, and tax planners manage to keep their jobs, otherwise the editorial board soon won’t be able to express opinions about anything anymore!