"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

President Trump is doing what the Republicans have always promised to do - turn the war over to the generals.

While most of the talk about the Pentagon’s proposals for various wars to President Trump has focused on requests for more troops in more countries, a much less publicized effort has also been getting rubber stamped, one giving commanders in those wars increasing autonomy on operations.
This has been a change that the Pentagon has been quite eager to seek, after years of complaining about President Obama “micromanaging” the various US wars, but it appears they may be trying to get a much broader collection of grants of autonomy than they’ve ever been granted before.

In a way it makes sense, in a bumper-sticker sort of way.
After all, who knows more about making war - generals or politicians?
Trump obviously doesn't inspire a lot of confidence on this issue, so his delegating this responsibility works well in Peoria.

It occurred to me that war-making isn't the only area where Republicans believe in "delegating to the professionals". They also like the idea when it comes to the economy, where professional businessmen are the preferred people.
Once again it makes sense, in a bumper-sticker sort of way.
Who knows more about the business of the economy - businessmen or politicians?

While this philosophy makes some sense, it also suffers from several fatal, fundamental flaws.
Let's start with war.

No one will argue that the generals know more about running a war than the politicians do.
But is war the objective? Is killing people and blowing sh*t up what we want to do?
There's a reason why Georges Clemenceau said, "War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men."
The best example of why Clemenceau is right also happens to be the most relevant - James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the guy running the military:

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”

Mattis knows how to fight a war, but its absolutely insane to let people like him run the war. Truman understood this when MacArthur wanted to nuke China and kill tens of millions of innocent people.

Republicans always approach a war like it's Munich in 1938, when in fact it's more often Vietnam in 1964.
In fact, Afghanistan is a lot more like Vietnam than any other war we've fought.

There, in a nutshell, is the U.S. war in Afghanistan. What began in 2001 as a focused effort to topple the Taliban and rout al Qaeda has become an endless, costly, and unrealistic effort with no clearly discernible endpoint and little hope of success. It has become our forgotten war, and the chief aim of those in charge of the operation seems to be keeping it off the front pages and out of the public eye.

We've been killing people in Afghanistan for going on 16 years and we've never been further from victory. Obviously killing people isn't the solution.
However, the military doesn't do diplomacy. It only does killing people. Diplomacy is the job of politicians, which is where we run into the problem: To Republicans it's always Munich in 1938. Even when it isn't.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is an amateur diplomat who apparently supports Trump’s proposal to cut the State Department’s budget by nearly 30 percent, and his initial forays into foreign policy suggest he still has a lot to learn.
Indifference to diplomacy is a problem here because the only long-term solution to the Afghan morass is a broad political settlement that reconciles the competing factions within Afghanistan and gets the outside powers that have been interfering there to play more constructive roles.

What is required here is tact, subtlety, and a deep knowledge of regional history and culture - all things that modern Republicans disdain.

This "turn it over to the professionals" attitude is reflected in the popular Republican refrain of "run the government like a business."
Which sounds pretty good until you realize that the country isn't a business and never will be.

For instance, a business executive is considered successful if he cuts costs to boost profits and shareholder dividends. That is true even when his cost cutting measures are breaking unions, offshoring jobs, slashing wages and layoffs.
Now consider running a whole country like this. It leads to only one place - ruin of the working class.

The problem here is, once again, the objective.
The objective of businesses are private profits. The objective of a country is general welfare. These two objectives are always in conflict.
That doesn't mean that both can't exist. It means that having only one exist is a recipe for disaster.

Most Republicans aren't stupid. Instead their crime is simply being lazy thinkers.
They think complicated issues should be able to fit on a bumper-sticker, and seem to distrust anyone who says otherwise.
This isn't a sin in and of itself. The sin is being too lazy to verify for themselves if this simplistic philosophy actually makes sense.