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Read some history about Russian propaganda; Putin is GOOD at this; it's a high-level art in Russia. Don't believe me, Comrade? Here, let this guy deconstruct it for you! http://smallwarsjournal.com/jr...

As to the Israelis having issues with AT rockets, they were surprised every time that happened from what I can tell. The two wars they had issues with were with the Egyptians in around 1973 and they had problems again in 2006 in Lebanon. In both cases the Israelis were surprised by the weapons and their doctrine did not account for them... and I think that more than anything caused the problem.

Well, yes - but the doctrine in question is exactly the one you're arguing is viable, advancing armor ahead of infantry that could back it up and engage enemy AT :)

As to the wider issues of urban warfare etc... this is just a question of enemies hiding behind women and children. If you're willing to kill women and children then this defense is gone. If you're not... then the enemy is invulnerable.

It's not so simple. Chechens weren't hiding behind their women and children in Grozny in 1994, for example, and Russians didn't really care either way in any case. But they didn't have the luxury of sitting there and demolishing the city building by building (and in any case they wanted to have the city, not to reduce it to rubble). Grozny still saw very extreme destruction in that war from bombs, artillery and tanks, but that rubble itself then provided plenty of cover to Chechen AT teams.

And again, the key deficiency in Russian planning was that they assumed that tanks could crush enemy infantry, and that they therefore had to lead the assault, while friendly infantry would follow them back at a distance to mop up & secure the area. It was during that initial assault that armor suffered heaviest losses. When they adjusted and put infantry in front as a screen, the losses have dropped significantly.

More reading:
http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys...
http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
http://smallwarsjournal.com/do...

Some notable quotes:

"According to many Russian officers, Chechen use of the antitank, or rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG), was the most effective city weapon. It could be used in the direct or indirect (that is, set up like a mortar) fire mode and was effective against people, vehicles, or helicopters as area or point weapons. ... Two other initial Russian mistakes were that they did not always properly employ infantrymen in support of armor attacks (they followed behind armor instead of feeling out Chechen ambush sites), and they did not hold an area once it had been cleared."

"Too many Russian tanks made advances without covering infantry"

"The problem with mobility can be seen in the vertical obstacle clearance capabilities of example tracked and wheeled vehicles. The M2 Bradley is able to clear a three foot obstacle, while the LAV, which has eight wheels, is only able to clear a one foot, eight inch vertical obstacle. In an urban environment, there are many short obstacles, some placed by the enemy and some a natural part of the city. If a vehicle is not able to climb over these obstacles, then it will become trapped in the street, and the Chechen tactics of taking out the lead and rear vehicles will work well against U.S. forces"

"The importance of an effective combined arms team became very evident in this MOUT situation. One of the major problems with sending tanks in by themselves was that they were not able to engage targets above or below the first floor. The main barrel on the T-72 tank, for instance, will not elevate higher than 14 or lower than –6, which is not enough to engage above or below the first floor of a building at close range. To add insult to injury, the Chechens developed a tactic of engaging Russian tanks with more than one RPG simultaneously. The tanks, however, were only able to return fire again

Human political consequences are controlled more tightly than ACK and NACK signals. What if Wikileaks received the information from other sources that would have been compromised by its publication because they worked with Americans and that was the only reason they had access to classified information. Wikileaks has not released many documents which it says it has access to. In politics, when the party leader wants an up or a down vote to make the president look good or bad, he/she gets it - very little of that process is connected with how well-informed the electorate or constituency is, because a lot is riding on figuring out a compromise.

Is punishing whistleblowers the answer?

From a certain perspective, PFC Manning was the only soldier who took his oath of service, not just his duty to follow orders, seriously. Every other, of the possibly millions, granted access at some point, either wanted job security or a higher rank. Given knowledge of the USB drives security protocols in use by the contractor forces during the years before PFC Manning's deployment, I would not be surprised if the soldier in the brig is a very large scapegoat for a much larger leak. Which, again, brings the prescient opinion of the respected Mr. Crowley back into focus - why did we all accept torture? Was it worth it?

And it seems that the data backs you up, particularly recently:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/532-osoriosullivan.pdf

3. He has an absolute obligation as a human being not to put other human beings in danger when there are other avenues to address the problem. This is especially pertinent, since his argument for releasing the information was that it shows his adversaries doing exactly that as well.

But again, he is actually going to wind up saving lives. Have you looked into what the documents actually SAY?

Start here, then come back to this post... I'll wait...

We have gone past the tipping point in Afghanistan, and any further actions on our part are more likely to lead to loss of life than to prevent it. Every time we act, we make our enemies stronger. We really ought to stop acting, but our government has been telling us the exact opposite thing. They say we're winning, that Afghanistan is safer, that the Taliban is on the run, etc. They're deliberately deceiving us, and WE HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO CALL THEM OUT ON IT. Just because of the label 'classified', are we to no longer be able to use logic to make our decisions? On what planet??

So tell me which obligation is greater:

1) Keep the secrets of your government's allies
or
2) Allow the military to deliberately deceive their democratic populace into supporting a failed war

Some secrets, once known, are far to evil to keep.

True. However, these were documents that put a large number of other American and Australian (and probably British and other nationalities) peoples in danger. Whether you agree that Americans defending themselves against Muslim radicals is right or not, what wikileaks did was an act against the United States of America

You might want to research what's actually in the data. For example:

To begin with, the data demonstrate an alarming rise in enemy activity. In 2004, the Taliban were averaging four attacks a day. By 2009, that figure had risen more than 15 times to 56 attacks per day. By comparison, U.S. actions over that time period rose only 9 times, from an average of 1.5 per day to 13.8.

...and...

Beginning in 2008, however, this deterrent effect had transformed into an escalatory effect. In 2009, this escalatory effect had reached a point where for every 2.5 actions the U.S. engaged in the Taliban committed one additional attack the next. U.S. actions are now making the Taliban more violent, not less.

This analysis demonstrates that disclosing the war diary information could potentially stop the escalation, failed policies, etc, and in effect SAVE THE LIVES of those same people you're claiming to care about. The 'support the troops' angle works both ways here. You want to safeguard their lives, and this should logically included not asking them to die for no reason whatsoever. The data shows we're making it worse, and had it not ever been released, we'd still think we were winning...

I'm sorry, the only source of information about a war is a picture of a dead soldier in a major newspaper?

I just googled combat dead in Iraq and found photos.

Desert Storm had a press pool.

http://web1.duc.auburn.edu/~benjadp/gulf/gulf.html

In OIF we had embedded reporters who had much less restrictive rules than Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Serbia or Desert Storm had.

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA423756&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/rodriguez.pdf

But for death porn, no it hasn't been as widespread as it was in Vietnam.

Lowest Common Denominator:
Corps AREN'T Human Beings!

Corporations are artificial "persons" that exist to convert resources into Temporary Monetary Gratification.

THAT is their "morality": it is their LAW.

Their "outsourcing" of entire sections of national economies, is simply the expression of this.
How can they have any "loyalty" to anyone, if they aren't real someones?

Lowest Common Denominator means that if there's a totalitarian regime somewhere that gratifies a corporation more, the corporation HAS THE OBLIGATION to ditch the alternatives & cater to that totalitarian regime, in exchange for its food, its 'hit', its gratification.
http://www.curseoftheblackgold.com/ for an example.

It isn't a person, so there is no "morality".

It hasn't a soul, so it can't have any real/long-term consequences.

So long as artificial persons have equal rights to real ones, but no real consequences ( privelege, or Private Lege/Law for corporations/lobbyists+special-interests ), then the removal of rights from real persons, *to* artificial persons, is unstoppable.

Take a look at what corporations/governments ( which are corporations, same as private corps's are ) do, to remove rights from the world:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/08/russiageorgia-the-impact-first/

And ask yourself what "morality" has to do with this world?

"Morality" is a sham, a fraud, something that doesn't have anything to do with what actually is.

Have a code of conduct, by all means, but recognize that 99.9% of the world has a *plastic* code of conduct, and that the "Stanford Experiment" showed that "inhumane" abuse is really included in the "normal" category, not rejected, as "morality" PRETENDS...

( there was an excellent book, years ago, on the criminality of the majority:
showing, explicitly, that the only thing limiting nearly-everyone from complete abuse of law was fear of getting seen/caught.
Cheating on taxes, taking things if it looks like no one else is looking, illegal drug use, rape, molesting, everything.
"Law Abiding Citizens" is a fraud, as only an autistic is going to toe the line, and autistics are defectives, everyone "knows" that.. saying exactly what they mean, being truthful, the idiots.. )

--

If you value your soul, then you'll stick to some code of conduct, even if it means your death.
THAT is the difference between those who have real integrity, and acceptable/normal ones, corps, gov't-corps, etc:
the ones with *real* integrity are deemed insane, and the less the normal world, and the insane, have to do with each other, the better for everyone, right?

I don't understand why such obvious facts are ignored by so many..

You want to fix "rights" and "morality" or some equivalent into the world, you are going to have to put corps in their place, removing their "full personhood rights, not much responsibility" from 'em.

Good Luck(tm).