(If you don’t get the headline, I’m having some fun with a classic Small Wars Journal post. All will become clear in a moment.)

So you might have seen this New York Times piece about military frustration with the pace of the Obama decisionmaking process. I wrote pretty much a full-on rant about that here, but I think there’s more to be said, in a real-talk way. The basic point I made over at the Windy (and please click through!) was that the military circles that are venting this frustration — which is understandable — may not sufficiently appreciate that Afghanistan is an unpopular war. Forgive me for quoting myself, but: “If elements of the military community dislike the fact that it’s taking weeks for Obama to refine his Afghanistan strategy now, they’ll really dislike what will happen if he hastily orders a politically unsustainable escalation and the reins get pulled back by a dissatisfied Congress in a year or so.”

Now, for what it’s worth, the piece kind of writes its frame around its evidence, as the actual quotes (with the exception of motherfucking Mike O’Hanlon; how predictable) are all caveated and rather respectful of the opposing side in the debate. But since I’ve heard some of these frustrations myself, I want to hinge off this graf:

Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”

This is that classic where-you-stand-is-where-you-sit thing. But this phenomenon encapsulates very well the inertial force that a war possesses. Protracted wars fought by democracies ultimately last only until publics decide they ought to. I doubt that any military officer would disagree with that proposition, no matter his or her perspective on a given war. But I’ve heard people in the broader defense community dismiss, diminish or deride public opinion, and particularly poll figures, in a way that embraces the pat assumption that public opinion is something to be worked around, not grappled with. At a counterinsurgency conference sponsored by Marine Corps University recently, the author and Marine Vietnam veteran Bing West unfavorably compared Obama’s focus on health-care reform with his focus on Afghanistan. West might not have meant it this way, but 47 million Americans and approximately 30 million American citizens without health insurance is not something to diminish, whatever the requirements of a war. Indeed, it’s ultimately counterproductive for elements of the military community to ask for a commitment to Afghanistan that’s just plainly unsustainable, politically. And this seems to be something the defense community needs to grapple with further.

Second, I read the piece and just thought: think about how tense it might be between Obama and the military if Obama didn’t retain Bob Gates at the Pentagon. Very few defense secretaries have commanded the sheer respect that Gates possesses. That’s why he’s able to march into the Association of the U.S. Army conference and tell everyone — and the fact that it was coming from the SecDef to the Army was not lost on anyone — to keep their opinions out of the papers, and the reaction, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been, “What an arrogant asshole,” but, “Huh, Gates probably has a point here.” I’ve written extensively about Gates’ crucial swing-vote role in the Afghanistan debate, and I’ll have way more in a mammoth piece I filed last week that should be out in early November. (Seriously. Five thousand words.) Think about it: Gates ordered McChrystal to strip his resource recommendations from his strategy assessment; prevented McChrystal from testifying on the Hill until after Obama makes his strategy decision, lest he become a political football for the GOP; and has sent all these unsubtle signals that McChrystal will either have to make a very strong case for a troop increase or Gates will reject it. By any measurement I can think of, Obama simply would be in a much worse position viz. the institutional military if Gates wasn’t by his side — and, for that matter, would probably have made worse decisions. I kind of chuckle to myself every time I come upon a derisive mention of Gates in the progressive blogosphere. Guys: you’ll miss him when he’s gone.

Finally, Matthew Yglesias has typically smart insights into the barometric significance of why the “policy analyst” in NYT piece is granted anonymity.