Actually my Mom does like computers although she, like many other people of a certain age, are intimidated by the wrenching paradigm change computers and the internet represent. If you are say, under the age of 40, computers are simply a fact of life that we don't give a second thought. Just yesterday, my own mother needed to find a telephone number and was looking for a telephone book, which confused the hell out of my son who thinks--need a phone number--look it up on the internet.

My mom, who uses the web and email, tentatively perhaps, but optimistically, tells me that most people her age are simply bewildered by computers or actually fear them outright. Surprisingly, you don't have to be all that old to have a problem with the dang computer-thingy. My kids tell me that some of their friends don't have computers because their parents won't have them in the house--these are people in their forties and early fifties!

This however, is not a post about old people and their fear of a changing world.

Rather its about an officer cadre in the military who fear a changing world, because ultimately, when you really pay attention to what the retired military critics of the Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration are saying, it boils down to the "newfangled military doctrine".

I just erased a good portion of this post because I found someone who wrote a much better one.

Big Lizard's blogger Dafydd has posted about as good an exposition of the underlying problem in the military's officer corps as can be written.

Even before the Iraq War, Secretary Rumsfeld embarked upon a revolutionary reformation, not only of how we fight wars but also the entire organization of our military forces. He is pushing towards smaller units, more unit independence (moving command decisions down the ranks), much greater reliance on Special Forces, and a reorganization of units to be self-sufficient rather than specialized.

It's hardly surprising that some men who have invested so much of their lives in one particular way of running a war would be angry, rebellious, and confused by a completely different way of running a war... or that some of them would lash out at the symbol of that change. They are no different from vice presidents at General Motors or IBM who furiously denounce splitting those companies into self-reliant business units instead of the normal corporate divisions they've had for twenty years.

Read the whole thing...and embrace change.