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How Technology Failed in Iraq
synthespian writes "US troops in Iraq were supposed to have a clear superiority in the battlefield because of sensors and networking devices such as aircraft- and satellite-mounted motion sensors, heat detectors, as well as image and communications eavesdroppers. On April 3, 2003, the task to take over a key Euphrates River bridge about 30 kilometers southwest of Baghdad turned into a bloody hell as 'between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles. (...) "'We got nothing until they slammed into us"''(...). Read more about this story and the troubles and challenges the US military is experiencing in networking troops from Technology Review."
Perhaps we wouldn't have been in that kind of trouble if we hadn't been in Baghdad in the first place.
Technology is the least of our Middle East problems. Support for Israel may be the greatest cause of our problems.
They seem to base a lot of things around the idea that units are always connected.
But the problem came about because tey cannot always be, that while in motion or at great distances they pretty much lost the network meant to make tem most effective.
They need to figure out how to better keep intact the lines of communication, but also how to operate more effictively in a disconnected mode, and make the most of connectivity when it is degraded (seems like if they had email links up some primitive but useful data could have been transmitted to them as well - like an OGRE style text map of the area with enemy uints marked!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is no substitute for adequate/superior manpower, that is, quantity is in some cases - including this one - more important than any amount of silicon packed by the armed forces. At least, IMO
A blog like any other.
As if we really need to improve the weapons for the next war...
"If world war 3 is fought with nuclear weapons, then world war 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." Albert Einstein.
Keep working... I'll figure out how to put laser aim to my stones, and heat detectors to my sticks.
Once you become accustomed to what the technology is providing to you, you lose the skills that the technology was either enhancing or replacing. There's no reason, when satellites, sensors, and networks fail, that good old scouts and binocs, pieces of paper and pens can't get this information (Maybe not as readily, but at least some form of smart war-making).
We come back, again, to the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence is knowing how to fix your external camera feed, wisdom is knowing that you can look out the window.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Um, actually a few US soldiers with aluminum hats and uber guns (as in tanks) did in fact totally decimate a force roughly an order of magnitude more - without ANY deaths. Isn't that even sort of slightly impressive?
Even though there tanks cant really do much to ours, there were still other personell there that could have been killed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"US troops in Iraq were supposed to have a clear superiority in the battlefield..." I think the someone's forgetting that we rolled over the entire country in about a week.
the technology review pasted this flash ad right in the middle of the page --
"See How IBM Middleware connects people, processes and information.
Middleware is Everywhere. Can You See It?"
sheesh.
The Slashdot story shows a lack of appreciation of the reality. Those who presently control the U.S. government think that it doesn't matter if the weapons work. In fact, it is more profitable for them if they don't. The weapons makers and those who profit from government oil contracts want all war, all the time.
--
Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.
It's a simple algorithmic problem. The more advanced warfare becomes, the faster and deadlier it is. Military technology will probably always end up trying to reach the speed it has itself dictated for the battlefield.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Is that when you're fighting guerilla warfare, adding more technology doesn't work. That's the entire point of guerilla warfare, is it makes traditional responses impotent.
I think the problem here isn't that the Technology failed. I think the problem is that the American administration is completely misuing it. The technology the American army is based around is designed for very specific things: long-range strikes and getting a specific job done quickly and completely. The War in Iraq really vindicated this-- the beginning of the war was masterful. The problem was what happened once the "war" ended and the "occupation" began. At this point America started using a bunch of technology designed for one purpose for a purpose it just wasn't any good for-- holding territory. Um, this doesn't work so well. The Bush administration should know this, many of the people in the administration are the same people who campaigned within the defense department for these technologies in the first place. When you start trying to take an army that's equipped and trained to do one thing and then send them to do something totally other, you get situations like the ones described in this article.
I can only imagine the backlash that's going to come from this comment.
"Can you say that the world is better with Saddam in power?"
"Don't you see the need to support our troops in this time of crisis??"
Nobody's disputing that first fact, but it was accomplished the Max Power way. If you don't know what the Max Power way is, it's from the Simpsons, when Homer changes his way to Max Power.
Homer (Max Power) - "Kids, there are three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!!"
Bart - "Isn't that the wrong way??"
Homer (Max Power) - "Yeah, but faster."
Bush assumed that the US would be hailed as liberating heros when conquering Iraq, and didn't even comprehend the notion of an organized resistance, and now people are dying because of his lack of foresight. But that's not even the point I'm getting at. The point is that people can be against the war and still want the best for the troops overseas. To say that someone who is anti-war is not supporting the troops is like saying people who are anti-crime aren't supporting the work of prision guards. People do recognize the necessity of their work, but you also hope for a world where their services aren't needed, and when they are needed, you certainly don't send them out to die because of some preconceived notion that it's their job to die.
Wrong... this should not be modded as flamebait. You can't have a discussion of technical "failings" without considering the political and moral problems of invading Iraq. Such an artifical "unbundling" would be akin to a President who insists on separating faith, principles and tactics within his own mind. A mind like that might just start a horrible, bloody, mindless war. Nevermind.
Is this sig nificant?
I read one of the blogs about life in Baghdad a few months ago and there was one observation that captured my mind:
Americans are basically like aliens from a different world. They even don't look human with all the body armor and gear. And if they patrol in a city then everyone escapes from their way, the society opens up before them and closes immediately after they have passed. The patrol moves essentially in a vacuum, the streets desert at the sight of a Bradley, and they don't have any contact with the real world around them.
It is similar to shooting an octopus with a shotgun - the bullet passes right through the soft tissue and doesn't do any significant damage.
So it makes me wonder - would we have been any more successful if we didn't put that much effort into technology but human contact instead?
When men used to be men
Just read the whole article over the dinner table. It conspicuously leaves out any discussion of the merits of armor until the final paragraph. Far more interesting was a retired corporal on C-SPAN last night. He pointed out that if your enemy is coming at you with AK-47s and improvised bombs, putting on LESS armor is pretty much the stupidest thing you can do.
The TR article does mention hours-long downloads and network outages for soldiers in the field, making it sound like our info-warfare is not yet ready for demo, let alone rollout.
They gave a great example at the end of the article about a time when the connectivty model really worked, with great coordinating from a number of units including ground and air led to the very quick destruction of a convoy in Afganistan just because a pilot saw lights flashing out the window on a plane.
One of the things they nated was that Afgan special forces units were independant nodes just wired together - and that connection was maintained by an "Ubergeek" of the group. So perhaps what they needed in Iraq was a few more UberGeeks in units to ensure the maximum transmission flow possible for the situation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions.
Oh great. All that money and all we get is someone yelling "BEHIND YOU!!!"
There was a time when five to ten *thousand* Iraqi soldiers massed together to defend something? They had tanks and artillery and an honst-to-god opposition force? Where were the American press and their "embedded reporters" when this happened? All we ever saw of the invasion over here was M1 tanks driving to Baghdad on cruise control!
0 1 - just my two bits
I think you're thinking of the "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." slogan and trying to generalize it to fit other things.
It doesn't work. Let me provide you with some obviously false counter-examples:
Chicken doesn't taste like chicken. People taste like chicken.
Computers aren't made of silicon. People are made of silicon.
People don't make mistakes. People make mistakes.
As you can see, just making the claim isn't enough for it to be true. That last one doesn't even make sense.
On that note, technology fails all the time. Almost enough to say that it is a property of technology.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The military will see the need for a global highspeed wireless communications network and then somehow (someway) we will get it
I must have missed something in the story (I just scanned it), but where does it list what eventually happened? That would seem to be a notable omission.
How many Iraqi troops were killed/captured/ran away vs. US losses? It couldn't have been a major defeat for the American forces.
The article reads like a puff piece that is designed to encourage more expenditure on surveillance.
Forget being able to spot 30 tanks and 70 APCs. I'm sure they were well hidden.. ..*cough*..
Amongst all that sand and stuff...
I'm sure many nations would just be happy if they got some Friend or Foe recognition technology. Then maybe they'd stop bombing allied troops.
Aswell.. a device that would show them the difference between the home of a family of 6 and a rebel/freedom-fighter safe house might be handy.
There is no substitute for adequate/superior manpower, that is, quantity is in some cases
Don't forget about heart. Many times in history the smaller force has won because they believed in their cause. I'm not trying to say this is 'wrong war' or 'wrong time' but people who join a fight because they believe it's the fight of their generation often win.
Many of the soldiers in Iraq are inexperienced (National Guard), naive ("We'll roll over Bagdad") or they think they don't belong there (Blood for Oil). Take into account the belief that Iraq was nothing more than an upscale Afghanistan - it's far from it. More like Western Europe with sand. When Saddam "fell" they faced resistance from militias and that depressed them (because civilians were kicking their asses).
All in all, the soldiers were lied to. Not so much about why they were fighting, but who they were fighting. A war against Saddam has turned into a war against Iraq - something they were never prepared to fight.
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Dude, notice the date.
You might find this article interesting
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The Romans and British were able to rule large empires with relatively small forces because they were able to move forces around quickly to trouble spots.
This relied on their various subjects not being able to get together and coordinate simultaneous uprisings.
That's not true any more.
The subjects of the American empire can coordinate their resistance worldwide.
This story discusses a matter that is assuredly still classified. No discussion by those in the know will be permitted at this time. I suspect that in time, the story will be known to be far more complex than is being let on by the single mid-level staff officer that I saw quoted.
Whenever you learn the details about a situation, generally you find that the answer lies somewhere in between the extremes portrayed by those who mouth off to the press.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The US versus one of the five largest armies in the world? (and larger than France's or Germany's, FWIW). You can say lots of things about the occupation, or the coming elections, or your ideal of humanitarian aid. In terms of civialian an miltary deaths this was the most bloodless war every fought between two of the largest armies (I won't say top armies, numbers != strength).
It is neat to highlight where we did our worst, but the fact is we kicked ass. I'm too old (the recruiter thanked me for my time post 9-11) but my brother was called up from national guard and my younger fraternity brothers did time in "the sandbox" Rummy is wrong on points ("lighter and faster" still aint as good as "morer and heavier") but I read the damned article and the idea that we didn't have perfect information is both valid and shit. That happens, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"
Any marketing department would be fired if they merely didn't lose. Winning means pushing the boundaries.
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
In the past a bigger bomb or a better gun had clear understandable benefits and results in a war. However in modern times, people seem to have this belief that better technology will result in better results. Aircraft and satellite motion sensors? Gee, wow like thats helpful in a dense urban area like Baghdad when you have to worry about ambushs, which means your opponents are staying still waiting. Heat detectors? Again, useless in a dense area (is that red blob holding 'something' a policeman or an insurgent preparing to launch an ambush?) Eavesdropping gear? Nice, but we're not talking about spying on the Soviet Union anymore, we're talking about trying to spy on Casual Muhammad while he talks to his next door neighbor.
Sometimes the most basic solution is the best one, having men on the ground handing these situations face to face. Having two or three extra billion dollars worth of aircraft in the air won't do you any good when you're too scare to open fire in fear of killing civilians.
Exactly. What I find strange is that we're talking about the idea of improving "efficiency" on the battlefield as if it's a good thing. War should be difficult. It shouldn't be a cakewalk to go in and kill a bunch of people. Killing people, especially innocent civilians, SHOULD be difficult, if not because your conscience is stopping you, then maybe because the technology has problems, or it's not practical..
War should be difficult, to keep people from using it as a solution to problems that could be solved in another way, or in this case, by admitting that the problem of WMD's in Iraq doesn't even exist.
Despite my faith in technology, I recognize cutting-edge tech does not operate well in uncontrolled environments. Technology did not fail these soldiers, thier leadership did. Clearly some buzzword spouting contractor dazzled the military leadership, and the military leaders failed to cut through the bullshit.
War is the harshest of all conditions, this has been known for thousands of years. Anything that can go wrong, will. Go back to Sun Tzu. Go back to Militaides. The basic principles of war will not change, regardless of your technology. I dont care it it is recurve bows, steel, cannons, or satellite imagery.
Don't blame technology, blame those who blindly relied on it.
As Steve Jobs wisely once said:
'You can have hundreds of features in a product, but you will only use what you understand'
With this in mind, if we cross reference the military with the average helpdesk scenario, taking into account that military personnel are people too, then I can imagine the sorts of calls the support techs get are along the lines of 'which end do the bullets come out of' while the finer points of operating motion sensors and interpreting the subsequent data go silently underused.
"Can you say that the world is better with Saddam in power?"
One might observe that the equivalent hyperbolic reply is, "So you're in favor of killing american soldiers then?"
Also when talking about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their expectations of kisses and rose pettels, one should mention General Shinseki and others, who before congress testified that this was not going to happen, and we needed approximately 3 times as many troops to secure the country. One should also point out that the initial attack on Fallujia that went so awry, was at the objection of the Marine commander and the insistance of the politicians. These are the kinds of things that marked the failures in Somalia and Vietnam. This deficit of leadership has a high price tag, and the purpetual willingness to finance it via a merry-go-round of short term loans does little to bolster my confidence.
As a person who really supports our troops, I think maybe we should do the favor of not manufacturing crises. And how John Kerry handled himself and held a government accountable during a previous deficit of leadership, really gives me something significant to think about. Were I O'Neal, I'd want to think carefully about how well my aims were served by calling people's attention to that period.
No, you're over generalizing the saying. A better way to put it would be like: "Computers don't make calculations, people make calculations." Since, while the computer (gun) is doing the actual work (killing), the software (bullet) & computer needed to perform the calculation (killing) was created by a person, and it needs a person to actually do the task (either type in something and hit enter, or pull a triger).
hi
Damn right. People are too inclined to just modd down others when they hear something they don't like...
"American forces are not as superior as originally anticipated"
"US technology failed, they might even bring the draft back now"
"Bad politics has more to do with it than technology"
Another words get Bush out of the office now, because these type of statements are on the news every day. Don't modd each other down cause you are too patriotic to face the facts.
Technology is the least of our Middle East problems. Support for Israel may be the greatest cause of our problems.
Yes. How stupid are we to support the only liberal democracy in the middle east (iraq not withstanding). How stupid we are to support the only place in the middle east where both Jewish and Arab Muslim have citizenship and live together to reserach and produce amazing products and technologies. We should just allow Israel to be destroyed.
Grow a brain
Since you seem interested read The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom. It's about the willingness to fight (because memes are strong enough to make us).
By following the google search below you can view 'inside' the book:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Lucifer+Principle
Actually deals a lot with our Islamic based enemies. In some ways it offends some, but it wasn't meant to be that way.
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OMFG I never would have thought of that! They want war all the time so they can sell more weapons! They are pure evil! More evil than satan! What amazing insight. I want to subscribe to your newsletter.
> Perhaps we wouldn't have been in that kind of trouble if we
> hadn't been in Baghdad in the first place.
As much as that's an argument for another time, I will say this. What trouble? The article starts out on the premise that there were massive failures in iraq, and goes to state some info about one in particular.
Without comparing to what has happened in the past.
30 years ago it wouldn't be uncommon for 10,000 iraqi soldiers and 1000 american soldiers meeting to end up with most of the americans and a big chunk of the iraqis dead. In the entire war you'd be looking at deaths up above 100,000.
I don't go much on the iraq war, but relative to almost any other war preceding it, deaths on both 'sides' and on civilians has been low. Very very low.
(standard disclaimer: yeah all war deaths suck, all war is a failure of sorts, any loss of life is unacceptable etc)
Tiger I tank wiped the floor with everything. The Tiger II was heavier, more advanced, broke down even more and they couldn't build them fast enough. Eventually the massively inferior Shermans and T34s won due to sheer numbers, they were cheap and easy to make, as well as reliable.
Then there's the AK47. Just works, desert or jungle. M16?
War's rough on kit. Highly advanced stuff tends to be relatively fragile and takes a lot of manufacture. If I was buying kit for an army, I'd be putting words like robust, standardised/interchangable components, ease of manufacture at the very the top of the list of desirable features.
Deleted
It seems to me that in the US they really love their technology. Only, well, technology can only do so much. And sometiomes technology bites you on the ass. Look at the fiasco the technology caused in the last presidential elections... whereas putting an X on a piece of paper is nice simple and, with the proper measures, secure. The US military have the same problem. They lost the Vietnam war partly owing to the over reliance on helicopters yet somehow failed to learn anything.
I wonder if it's something to do with the feeling that people cannot be relied upon, and that you can rely on technology? But IYAM you must rely on people before you are able to rely on the tech.
If you'd RTFM, you might have noticed that the US troops essentially did roll right over them (zero fatal casualties against a multi-thousand man enemy force). ....which I think was the main point here. They were extremely luck they were fighting with better hardware, because their software was completely useless.
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> Bush assumed that the US would be hailed as liberating heros when conquering Iraq, and didn't even comprehend the notion of an organized resistance, and now people are dying because of his lack of foresight.
Indeed, months into the reality zone Rumsfeld was still scolding reporters for calling it a resistance movement.
Some people just can't distinguish between what they want and reality.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q= %2B%22No+plan+survives+contact+with+the+enemy%22+% 2Bvon+%2Bmoltke
And of course, Kerry's own words let us know that back in 2003, he agreed with you.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
You know this is just getting ridicules. The conflict in Iraq is far from anything resembling a failure. Take a look at history, from major conflicts to minor ones. Name me a single conflict, that has had one country defeat and then occupy another for over a year, and taken just 1000 casualties?
I study history and nothing comes to mind.
I feel for the family's that have lost loved ones, every solders life is important. That's why the military analyzes the hell out of every conflict, every battle they have ever fought.
There are many people on Slashdot that just hate Bush, and Americans in general, those people are hopeless useful idiots and they will complete ignore the fact that American and British Planes(The French sent only one plane, that flew rarely if ever), were being shot at daily. That should have been enough to resume hostilities as it was.
Add to that Mass Graves, the support of terrorists (this is 100% true, you can't deny it), and you have a major wild card out their that you just can't have in a post Sept. 11 world.
I could go on and on, about the UN oil for weapons... err... food program, but I really don't see the point. You Europeans just keep on electing your little Socialist "take care of me cradle to grave" governments, and point to the US and complain how we are the cause of every problem in history of the world and we will sit over here on the other side of the pond and kindly ignore you.
Killing people, especially innocent civilians, SHOULD be difficult, if not because your conscience is stopping you, then maybe because the technology has problems, or it's not practical..
Where have you been? Improved technology has allowed a political climate to make killing civilians more difficult.
In ancient times, logistical issues meant armies could raze cities, rob food stores, etc., because they needed to survive. WWII the technology to only hit military targets didn't exist so carpet bombing killing tens of thousands of people was an accepted convention of war. Now a bomb goes awry and kills a half dozen people and the news jumps all over it.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
1. Troop levels. Most of the military observers belive that more troops would have done a better job. Estimates on the ideal number of troops range from 200.000-400.000.
2. Taking Bagdad fast.Yes I know that bypassing some of Saddams forces was intentional. But when they captured Bagdad they stood there with what? A couple thousand soldiers and some tanks/APCs/trucks? And without a plan.. People I have talked to say it took several weeks before troopl levels in Baghdad reached the level they needed to control the central ares in Baghdad.
3. Armor on the 5 ton truck. Non-existant. Say no more. Allready in 1995 Russia discovered that chechnyan "rebells" attacked their underarmed and unarmored supply vehicles with small arms fire and IEDs. This forced the Russians to use up to 60% of their forces for protection/guarding/convoys etc.
4. Armor on APC's and HUMMVEEs. How many of the humvees had some form of armor/extra splinter protection? 15? How long did it take before they started to improve this? 8 months? And what about the M-113; uppgrade program going on for the last ten year and still some without the scheduled armor upgrade?
5. Availability of "bullet-proof" vests. I don't know much about this one. But the litle that I have heard about old flak vests doesn't exactly put the upper managment in a very positive light.
6. Disbanding the Iraqi army. 250.000 young males without a job. Riots in Baghdad.
7. Lack of guarding the Iraqi barracks, storages and weapon sites/dumps. Yes Iraqis do have an extensive weapon culture with AK's, grenades and maybe an RPG stacked under the bed "just in case". But few people store 200 pound bombs in their homes for future IED-use so they must get it from somewhere!
8. Mass-arrests in autumn 2003. Probably prisoning a lot of innocent people. Alienating suporters.
9. Abu Graib torture scandal. A nice mix of contarctors and the CIA. Enough said.
10. Scaling down troop levels in February 2004 and strategy of moving out of many small cities/villages into larger camps.
11. Leaving some areas, effectivly handing them over to the insurgents and making them no go zones.
12. So far, failure to train enough Iraqi troops of high enough quality.
The strange thing is that;
a. To some extent I find it hard to blame the Army/Marines on some of the above mentioned points as no one told them about the need to fight the kind of war they know are fighting.
b. Many of the points are related to non-existant political planning.
c. All the issues are related to #1. Troop levels. With more troops many of them would not have been a problem. So Rumsfeld should resign IMHO.
Yes, I know I'm only some 5 Karma Star Armchair General in front of a PC and it's easy to critize but still...
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Tech can help you take out the enemy on the battlefield.
Tech will not help after the war.
To re-establish order, you need people on the ground. Lots of them. You need leadership. You need a strategy.
Destruction is easy. It's re-building that is the problem.
Your counter-examples don't fit the form.
The form is: 'X (linking verb) not Y Z. Z Y Z.'
So,
Chicken doesn't taste like chicken. People taste like chicken.
There's no sensical direct conversion (beyond stating P is ~P; P is P), but here's one that uses a few of the components:
People don't taste like chicken. Chicken tastes like chicken.
Computers aren't made of silicon. People are made of silicon.
Computers aren't made out of silicon. Computers are made out of computers.
People don't make mistakes. People make mistakes.
People don't make mistakes. Mistakes make mistakes.
His example is "Technology doesn't fail [people]. People fail [people]." which fits the form. Your only real argument against that is to claim that the implied words aren't "people" but something else in which case you'd be right it fails the form.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/
"Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq."
I see alot of comments about how we are stupid for getting into this conflict, but when reading the article I see that it wasn't much of a battle.
"In the early-morning hours of April 3, it was old-fashioned training, better firepower, superior equipment, air support, and enemy incompetence that led to a lopsided victory for the U.S. troops. "When the sun came up that morning, the sight of the cost in human life the Iraqis paid for that assault, and burning vehicles, was something I will never forget," Marcone says. "It was a gruesome sight. You look down the road that led to Baghdad, for a mile, mile and a half, you couldn't walk without stepping on a body part."
Even when our troops were grossly outnumbered we still did quite well:
Yet just eight U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously, during the bridge fighting. Whereas U.S. tanks could withstand a direct hit from Iraqi shells, Iraqi vehicles would "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says.
Technology did not fail in Iraq, it allowed us to kill lots of enemies even when those enemies were completely unexpected.
"This is your PDA. Next to your flashlight this is the most important piece of gear we will issue you..."
Not that I want to see the Arab royalty replaced by fundamentalist Islamists.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Information. And the best information comes from the soldiers on the ground being friendly with natives who actually want you to succeed.
Bomb from UAVs and you're just a faceless enemy drumming up new recruits.
Deleted
You can't discuss technical failings without considering political and moral problems? You must have been a liberal arts student.
You are certainly welcome to discuss your political views, but it's ridiculous to say that they are inseparable from the technical issues. Here's a little example for you: Let's say that I believe that cars are the cause of moral decay, because they destroy the small-town communities of yesteryear. You don't have to agree -- it's just my personal opinion. Now let's have a discussion about steel.
Since I despise cars, I likewise despise steel; after all, it's the primary ingredient in cars. Next, suppose that steel quality was declining. Certainly this is welcome on the automobile front -- it makes cars more dangerous and expensive, and therefore less useful and common. Unfortunately it also kills people while they sit in their steel-framed office building, or while they ride their bicycle across a steel bridge. But hey, that would be an incomplete technical evaluation -- when you consider the big picture it's not so bad, because automobiles are in decline.
However you feel about the war in Iraq, those feelings would likely not be different if we were fighting them with muzzle-loaded rifles hard doughnuts -- IT'S NOT A TECHNOLOGICAL PROBLEM, AND YOU CAN'T FIX IT BY CHANGING THE TECHNOLOGY. It's been said a thousand times, about a thousand subjects. You can't fix social, moral, ethical, political, spiritual, or any other non-technical issue with technology, or by ignoring technology. Computers will not end world hunger, but they might be used to calculate an optimal planting pattern. Skies will not prevent hypothermia, but they might help you get in from the cold faster. Technology is only a tool; it does not start or end wars.
Maybe the war in Iraq was a terrible idea. You're welcome to feel that way, to tell other about it, and to try to fix it. Refusing to fix military technology seems like a bad plan though. What happens when China decides that they want the oil in Alaska, and they "don't need no stinkin' EPA approval"? When we've meet whatever standard you set for reasonable military action, you'll want the technical issues to be resolved.
According to Larry Wall: "It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend."
per dolorem ad astra
Bottom line, they took the bridge and the airport. Something must have worked.
So, rather than saying that American forces overcame an ambush by an overwhelming force, the magazine spins this as the failure of the vaunted U.S. technology.
It's a load of crap.
sigs, as if you care.
Take a look at history, from major conflicts to minor ones. Name me a single conflict, that has had one country defeat and then occupy another for over a year, and taken just 1000 casualties?
Falkland Islands
Grenada
Panama
I study history and nothing comes to mind.
Well then.....
There are many people on Slashdot that just hate Bush, and Americans in general, those people are hopeless useful idiots and they will complete ignore the fact that American and British Planes(The French sent only one plane, that flew rarely if ever), were being shot at daily. That should have been enough to resume hostilities as it was.
We invade Iraqi airspace and you claim it is their fault?
Add to that Mass Graves, the support of terrorists (this is 100% true, you can't deny it), and you have a major wild card out their that you just can't have in a post Sept. 11 world.
Iraq has never supported anti-US terrorism.
Why couldn't we leave Iraq? The containment was working. Iraq wasn't a threat to anyone.
I could go on and on, about the UN oil for weapons... err... food program, but I really don't see the point.
RTFA. Those "weapons" you're talking about sure did a lot, didn't they?
"In difficult recruiting environments, it is inevitable that either quality standards or recruiting resources be subject to adjustment," said Richard I. Stark Jr., a retired Army colonel who is a military-personnel specialist at the Center for Strategic & International Studies here. "The Army has been forced to adjust to both."
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Look at it from the other direction. War against the West is difficult, as has been proven in Kuwait/Iraq in 1991, and in the fragments of former Yugoslavia in the 90s. Even the Somalis know that a relatively small force of Western soldiers can leave behind hundreds of bodies even in defeat.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Information. And the best information comes from the soldiers on the ground being friendly with natives who actually want you to succeed.
Yep.
Bomb from UAVs and you're just a faceless enemy drumming up new recruits.
Without the information you mentioned in your first paragraph, the UAV's won't be able to hit the real insurgents.
As long as we're dropping bombs, the people will know we're at war with THEM.
The WAR has to END and the PEACE has to begin. And PEACE does not involve UAV's bombing apartment houses. It involves police work and arrests.
We're stuck in war-mode and war-mode will never win the peace.
omgzergrush
That party in your sig is really cool... If you're into socialism/communism.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I sure feel a lot safer knowing that thousands of their loved ones are dead. :p
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
"Its only high-tech so I can sell it to you."
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
MODERATORS: Whoever moderated the parent comment as Flamebait is not smart enough to be called ignorant, he is iggerunt.
The parent comment says, "Support for Israel may be the greatest cause of our problems." The king of Jordan says this is so. The foreign minister of Iran says this is so. (They were both interviewed on the Charlie Rose show.) Osama bin Laden said U.S. government support for Israeli violence was one of the two reasons he attacked the United States. (The other reason was U.S. government support for those who are against needed political change in Saudi Arabia.)
The U.S. government has been supporting the killing of Arabs for many years now by giving between 3.5 and 5 billion of your tax money to Israel, every year. There are only 14 million Jews in the entire world. There are only 4.8 million Jews in Israel. That money is about $1,000 for every man, woman, child, and baby in Israel who is Jewish, every year.
That money must be used to buy weapons made in the United States, at inflated prices. I seriously doubt that anyone who is in control of this policy has anything against Arabs or Jews, or even knows much about their cultures. It's government corruption, only that, not ideology.
To get votes from the millions of Jews in New York, Governor Pataki basically declared war on Arabs. To learn more about this, see the article, New York Governor Pataki's statements are equivalent to a declaration of war. Those who want power don't care how much damage they do.
Osama bin Laden says he wants a Muslim-religion-controlled political coalition. I've studied the matter for years, and I don't think there is much chance he can achieve that. The violent religious extremists in Muslim countries are not crazier than the violent religious extremists in the United States, however. The corruption caused by those who want weapons profits is supported by some of those who call themselves evangelicals. The evangelicals have an ugly plan that sounds to me like it might achieve a terrible goal. They want to kill all the Jews. They don't say that, of course. They don't take reponsibility for that. They say that their ancient books say that all the Jews will be killed or converted. Since there is slim chance that Jewish people would want to be evangelicals, or would be accepted by evangelicals, they are really saying that all the Jews will be killed. They are helping their prophecy by encouraging the 14 million Jews to get into bloody battles with the 1.1 billion Muslims. Experiment: Go into a very poor area of the U.S. and ask the next 10 street kids you see what they think the outcome of such battles will be. I will accept whatever they say.
Abba Eban, a respected Jewish leader, said that after World War II Jews were not welcome in Europe, even though they had suffered a lot. I agree with that. Some Jewish violent extremists believe that Jews must fight for their own land because they are not welcome elsewhere. That's not true, of course; Jews do very well in making contributions to New York. The weapons makers encourage the Jews in their worst impulses.
--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.
I now this is somewhat offtopic.
But while some people do at least try to count the civilian victims of te latest Iraq war (here),
I never heard any estimates on the number of Iraq military victims.
Does anyone now of any estimates?
Sound familiar?
BBC Analysis: How Yugoslavia hid its tanks.
Remember all that sensor tech we were told was flying around? Remember all the bombardment? Remember the Brit groundtroops' shock when all that intact Serb armor rolled out after ceasefire? Nobody was feeling good about that. We had figured by that point the troops would be relatively unopposed had they gone in firing. We were very wrong.
Believing the corporate and political hype on the new gear is a big problem. Huge sums of cash and careers ride on it, so we aren't getting good information about it at the voting level or the shooting level. Successes and mere premises get paraded, while failures get "classified" for "national security" reasons. Like Rummy classifying all further testing of the 'missle shield' after the early attempts weren't working too well.
I don't have a problem with developing and applying this stuff, but it's got to work on the level of the blood and guts of my neighbors in uniform, and real home safety. It's not. We need a much more open view of our investments for exactly the national security reason that our current porkbarrels are hiding it under.
And what really scares the bejeesus out of me is these idiots are making national policy decisions as if the gear works. They pad the numbers and then believe it. I want to see real conservatism at the top. This faith crap is killing people.
Here's the site on minimums/maximums for enlisting.
u ir ements.html
Min age 17 / max age 35.
http://www.armedforcescareers.com/enlistmentreq
It's the same for officers (except doctors who can be almost 50 before accepting a commission).
The big difference between that conflict and the present one is a major player other than the US is in the region and has a whole lot of nukes.
Seastead this.
Tech itself have not much use unless it is driven by something, soemthing that we call human.
It doesn't matter what the sensor tell us, if people just ignore the data from those sensor, it won't do anything.
On the other hand, people can assume things (eg. nuclear weapon), and does not matter what those "sensors" dectect, peole will just interpret them as threats.
Yeah. What if all those kids just walked into town, let their beards grow a little, took their weapons off, and just hung out with the locals, instead of treating them like "The Enemy" (tm)?
.. yet.
I'll tell you: the war would be over. Iraqi's would get to know Americans. Americans would get to know Iraqi's.
Right now, the war is perpetuated by the thin layer that exists between Iraqi and America (uniform, weapon, ammo, base camp). Get rid of that layer, and you'll have no more war.
Human contact is highly effective at finishing war. Imagine if those cruise missiles were delivering water pump parts to Darfur, instead?
And, before the hard-ass warmongers come down on me as a 'non-realist', and try to remind me that if you throw away your weapons, you're setting yourself up for a headshot, let me just say that its a damned good thing that your type haven't figured out how to weaponize human relationships
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Assuming everyone had working satellite phones, and perhaps that was how they were getting email, it seems to me that throwing more people at it could be at least a temporary solution. Simply call up or send an email "Approaching 3 degrees north by 73 west, please advise" might elicit a human reply "20 tanks and 60 vehicles within 5 miles, may be transport. At your current speed, you will intercept them in 30 minutes, they are 4 miles north by northwest of you."
Farther in the future, a computer should be able to extrapolate that information from the satellite images and transform it into plain text that the troops can then download by logging in to a website or something, or perhaps vector graphics and low resolution images could supply them with the information they need. All they need to know is the enemy's position relative to theirs. While this might sound like some sort of tank game from the mid 80's, based on the article it would seem that this rudimentary level if information would have been invaluable to them.
This whole thing reminds me of the book Human Error. Tight coupling (C depends on B, which depends on A, so objective Z will fail to be met if any of the previous 25 points fail) meant that the otherwise available information was unavailable to the people who needed it the most. A looser system, like the one used in Afgahnastan would have worked in a wider range of situations. The methods of communication were flexible rather than fixed, and could therefore be used in a wider range of situations.
Hopefully the next generation of military technology will fail gracefully. That is, still be usable even when bandwidth is low.
I also have to wonder about what will happen, as it always does, when the current cutting edge technology is commonly available. Okay, it's not likely anyone else will have satellites any time soon, but when our enemies can track our movements quickly and easily, share information amongst themselves and have their own un-manned vehicles, what strategic advantage will we have? Once you reach the point of dimishing returns (just how detailed a map can you download if you have broadband in your tank? How detailed does it need to be? Can it have real time satellite images? etc.) what happens to our advantage?
What it has demonstrated it's absolutely useless at is occupying a country and dealing with an insurgency. I'm no expert, but from what I've read a fair whack of blame should be placed on the political leadership that didn't do any planning for this. However, there is also an issue that the US doesn't train or prepare its military for such jobs. That's just asking for trouble.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I agree with everything but this one.
a. To some extent I find it hard to blame the Army/Marines on some of the above mentioned points as no one told them about the need to fight the kind of war they know are fighting.
I find it impossible to blame them (except for #9). We did not ramp up our troops or equipment levels and the US population still has not been asked to make any sacrifices for the troops in the field.
Compare this to WWI and WWII. You'll see the difference. We should have had all the kevlar vests, bullets and vehicular armour before we went it and it should have been a massive, country-wide push to get it.
For example: it has been estimated that several thousand civilians died in the first few days of the war (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/). You would think that this was a major tragedy and worth talking about. What was reported? Little. Where were the pictures of the effects of the war, the analysis?
Both NBCs Dan Rather http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,717097 ,00.html
and NPR's Morning Edition host Bob Edwards http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2003/cyb20030423.as p#3
have questioned the propaganda
that they (the media) delivered to us. Dan Rather called it "patriotism run amok" and said that it was in danger of trampling freedom of the press.
Another example: why did the woman who photographed soldier's coffins returning lose her job? Because the war news is being controlled by spin doctors, not being reported in the sense that you and I think of reporting.
I don't think I'd trust anything that comes out of Dan Rather's mouth after what's happened recently and in the past.
-]Phreak Out[-
and in a democracy citizens are supposed to judge how how well run the country is (which includes how well run its military actions are) and vote accordingly.
The article wasn't talking about guerrilla warfare.
It was talking about an actual conventional warfare situation where the technology somehow didn't help the US soldiers in the frontline.
is that Bush had a plan to get out of Viet Nam.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
client doesn't know it's real needs, can't write down requirements properly, is unable to test the systems, and last but not least the most noisy bidder gets their vapourvare sold.
armed forces myself I don't thing its technology we should be most concerned with...Its 99% leadership. I can't tell how many times things have been screwed up because our senior ranking officals thought their way was better. Just because you have technology doesn't always equate to the right choice. Good leadership and well trained troops well always win the war. (Unless China develops a Death Star.) ex...Patton, Washington...just to name a few
"To say that someone who is anti-war is not supporting the troops is like saying people who are anti-crime aren't supporting the work of prision guards. People do recognize the necessity of their work, but you also hope for a world where their services aren't needed, and when they are needed, you certainly don't send them out to die because of some preconceived notion that it's their job to die."
Sending solders to war and your quote are different. Think it as following. There are hostages in a warehouse filled many thugs and such. So, the police send in the SWAT team to remove the bad guys, but while doing so people are yelling that that it was wrong to send in the SWAT team in the first place.
What your quote is about is having a military force to begin with. You may be anti-war, but agree to needing a military while hoping it is never needed. Having a military and using it is a different concept.
Also, it is not the "preconceived notion" that solders can be sent of to die. But being in the military, I know it is my job to fight war. Also, you must understand that while people are protesting the war, that gives the people we are fighting hope to stick it out longer. The longer they stick out, the more of my buddies they blow holes into.
It may seem that there is no problem with openly having angst to an armed conflict, but the people who are in Iraq at this moment, bad comments, although indirect to you, affect then directly.
If America was really pro-war, the troops would get more equipment, and our enemy's moral would break sooner. I am not saying that you should not be able to talk against the war, but the sad truth is when an insurgent reads on the internet that half of America hates the war and political parties want to just "up and leave", well that gives him the hope to shoot another few people in camouflage, and abduct a few more reporters because if it lasts long enough, America might just "up and leave" just like Vietnam.
This is not a clear cut world, and this is certainty not a clear cut issue. What everyone says effects this conflict as a whole, and the people in Iraq (the troops, and the people who want the insurgents to give up) are the ones who feel it the most.
Saddam may or may not been a threat, but Bushes actions in Iraq appear to be creating more people liable to kill Americans then any other action previously.
going up against those odds and coming out ahead sounds like technology worked damn fine for me. why is it that everyone expects every possible peice of technology to be 100% functional 100% of the time.
These things are made by men to a certain spec and when you try to use it beyond that, well... it may it may not work.
Where have you been? Improved technology has allowed a political climate to make killing civilians more difficult.
You might need to ask yourself the same question.
About 50% of those who died in WW2 were civilian, up from 10% in WW1. In the US invasion of Panama in 1989 about 13 civilians were killed for every military death.
Iraq's ratio of civilian to miltary fatalities is currently running at about 33 to 1, and there is no reason to think that trend will not continue.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
""Can you say that the world is better with Saddam in power?""
Objectively speaking you can definately say that the world was a better place with Saddam in power. Just in the last month there have been bombings in France, Egypt, indonesia, israel, palestine, and of course all over Iraq. That's just in one month. Since the start of the war (when saddam left power) there have been devestating bombings all over the world. remember Bali, Spain, and the hotel bombing in kenya.
The world is much worse off since Saddam has been removed from power no matter how you measure it.
evil is as evil does
Now some chemical agents show up in other parts of Europe that Iraq was supposed to have, and Iraq hasn't kept account of what happened to all of their chemical agents.
What are you talking about? And provide citations from established sources. No personal webpages.
Yes but none of it was really necessary. We could have removed Saddam a hundred different ways.
BTW over 10,000 iraqi civillians have been killed. If the US hit ratio is 10 combatants for every innocent civillian then 110,000 human beings have died removing Saddam and installing Allawi (mini saddam). In actuality I am sure the US military is way more accurate then 90%, I would not be surprised if the total dead was two or three hundred thousand.
evil is as evil does
Yeah, ok, let's go back to a bunch of savages clubbing people to death.
Efficiency in fact saves lives. Would you prefer long, drawn out battles?
That people really think like this amazes me.
This is exactly why technology and strategy/tactics in warfare is a very good thing and saves lives.
Without air power, armor superiority, superior technology, etc, it would have probably been a long, drawn out infantry war that would have claimed many more lives on both sides.
5 ton trucks are supposed to be protected by other units, not to be some kind of independent battle fortresses. For troop carrying needs in combat zone there are armored APCs.
Basic armor protection is necessary for actual combat vehicles, but within reason. Stryker is an excellent vehicle (although there are better foreign alternatives) in modern warfare. Speed and troop carrying capability are its strengths and make it harder to destroy. 20 tons or more of extra armor makes it just an easier target.
Were this a different war with a draft in the US things would be different but it's not. Were some foreign power invading a sovereign nation I would support the volunteer troops of the nation which was invaded. Seems to me that the insurgents in Iraq are doing just that, volunteering to fight against a foreign invader.
But any talk of supporting US troops overseas reminds me of a different comedy quote from Monty Python:
Colonel: Come in, what do you want?
(Private Watkins enters and salutes.)
Watkins: I'd like to leave the army please, sir.
Colonel: Good heavens man, why?
Watkins: It's dangerous.
Colonel: What?
Watkins: There are people with guns out there, sir.
Colonel: What?
Watkins: Real guns, sir. Not toy ones, sir. Proper ones, sir. They've all got 'em. All of 'em, sir. And some of 'em have got tanks.
Colonel: Watkins, they are on our side.
Watkins: And grenades, sir. And machine guns, sir. So I'd like to leave, sir, before I get killed, please.
Colonel: Watkins, you've only been in the army a day.
Watkins: I know sir but people get killed, properly dead, sir, no barley cross fingers, sir. A bloke was telling me, if you're in the army and there's a war you have to go and fight.
Colonel: That's true.
Watkins: Well I mean, blimey, I mean if it was a big war somebody could be hurt.
Colonel: Watkins why did you join the army?
Watkins: For the water-skiing and for the travel, sir. And not for the killing, sir. I asked them to put it on my form, sir - no killing.
Colonel: Watkins are you a pacifist?
Watkins: No sir, l'm not a pacifist, sir. I'm a coward.
The point is that heavy armour did the job. Not information technology. Yet some try to replace the former with the latter.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
while Googling refs from posts here I came across an Asian view on the reliance of modern warfare on ancient experience...
Saddam did have ties to al Qaeda.
/.
1 0/ 22/1456213&tid=226
I find it strange that the 9/11 report from Congress does not include that then. How fascinating.
Maybe you'd be interested in this other story on
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/
Also, you must understand that while people are protesting the war, that gives the people we are fighting hope to stick it out longer. The longer they stick out, the more of my buddies they blow holes into. [...] but the sad truth is when an insurgent reads on the internet that half of America hates the war and political parties want to just "up and leave", well that gives him the hope to shoot another few people in camouflage"
To the resistance in Iraq, does it really matter if they know that the American in public in general is "pro-war", "anti-war" or undecided? A U.S.-led force invaded their country, occupied it, killed many of their buddies and family, broke normality and turned their reality into chaos. It doesn't matter whether the resitance has some kind of "right" to fight back or not, or if they were or are "pro-Saddam" or "pro-dictatorship" or muslim or christians or agnostics or whatever. If we think about it, wouldn't they fight back with whatever means necessary for as long as they can, just as you would? It is simply not possible to 'break' the moral of resistance like that psychologically, which has been proved over and over again. The Romans did not succed anywhere. The crusades did not succeed in Jerusalem. Israel has not succeded doing just this in Gaza. Germany did not succeed anywhere in World War II. We might ask ourselves this a retorical question: If the situation would be reversed; if a technologically superior force invaded and occupied the country we live in and enforced the same type of government that exist in Iraq today, wouldn't you try to fight back until the enemy was gone, no matter what?
Given that much of the fault seems to sheet home to the civilians who ultimately tell the military what to do (ie the Bush administration) it follows that those people should also be fired.A very convenient opportunity to do so is coming up in a bit over a week.
It truly astounds me that there remains a distinct possibility that the American people won't do so.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Hey, I'm opposed to the war too. But the righteousnous of the war is neither here nor there. Unless you're an absolute pacifist and want to disband the Armed Forces, you should be be interested in how the Irag war is being fought. Whether it should be fought at all is a whole different issue.
Sounds like a good plan:
More people liable to kill US americans,
--> more fear
--> more votes for Bush
See ? It all works out in the end.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Think alot of the more senior military types have forgetten with all their joy over their new toys that there is only thing that can take and hold teritory - and that is the PBI.
Sure the airforce, artilery and technology all have their place in helping take and hold ground but without training in dealing with whatever will be encountered - from conventional warface to counter-terrorism, pacification (ideally by getting locals on your side rather than alienating them) - technology is worth bugger all.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
While you have a point that the motivations of many of these guys aren't ones we should have sympathy with, their tactics are pretty much par for the course.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
- a) Let them stay at home, in (relative) comfort, and (relative) safety, or
- b) Send them out into the most unstable part of the world, surrounded by tens of thousands of natives who resent their presence and spend much of their time shooting at them, bombing them, and otherwise making their lives a misery?
Huh?Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
[blockquote]Gee. Maybe it could have something to do with the rise of terrorism since 9-11. You think that muslims are beheading old men and woman in Thailand has to do with the war in Iraq?[/blockquote]
yes, the war in iraq has created an image that the US is on a war against muslims
this is really basic... of course you don't tell the point infantry unit what they're running into, if you did they probably wouldn't go.
00010111 always try everything twice
Civilian death ratio is apples to oranges comparison, since higher civilian ratio is expected in an urban combat environment.
I was referring to what is accepted in the political environment, specifically the scale of civilian casualties and destruction for a given mission given technological improvements.
To take out a military target we no longer would accept WWI style sacking of cities, WWII carpet bombings, or vietnam style napalm attacks in civilian areas.
Now acceptable conventions requires occupation and policing a city, with limited strikes on specific targets.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
At least Saddam managed to keep Iraq free of muslim extremists, something the US is failing completely.
We do NOT make other countries in our own image. The desire for freedom is the natural goal of the human existence. In fact, I would say the behavor is almost genetic. Yet, it's clueless minded people like you who go off and spout how "Imperialistic" America is. This notion is utter BS! Just look at Japan, Germany, South Korea to name a few. They have freedoms as a direct resault of America having a helping hand. However, they still have their own cuture and even their own constitution. To say otherwise is pure insanity.
But hey, I guess you would rather have Saddam in power filling up mass graves and finding other places to hide the bodies in que. And N. Korea is ok too. I mean, Kim is such a NICE guy.
People like you are so ignorant is terrifies me! I don't hate you...I'm scared shitless of you with your level of thinking!
Life is not for the lazy.
If you don't like my generalization, then please tell me exactly how the "technology" failed to meet its objectives. As far as I know, we have guns, tanks, body armor, satellites, but we don't have one so-called "technology" that is able to win the peace against guerilla warfare within a heavily populated civilian area.
Americans have always been trying to force their own style of warfare. They come up with a new strategy and test it and then think that it can be applied in real war.
The simple fact is that war doesn't change. Ever. At all. Don't believe me? WW2, D-day landings. You seen the movies and seen the historical footage. Now chance one little thing. The americans soldiers are not emerging from landing craft but instead emerging from holes in the ground, climbing out of trenches and foxholes and running accorss open ground towards an entrenched enemy with plenty of machine guns.
Can you say WW1 and its famous charges? But how was that any different from an agincourt(or however it is spelt) where troops charged into a field of longbow arrow fire?
There are 3 types of combat, the first is where the attacker attacks a prepared enemy firing back. Slaughter unless you got some wicked armour or the enemy is a lousy shot. The second is where the attacker has the suprise and the enemy is unprepared or not fighting back. Slaughter unless the attacker is a lousy shot. The last is where you got two prepared enemies shooting it out. Slaughter on both sides. 1 and 3 are best avoided, you want an enemy asleep, tied down, with no ammo and smaller then you. Outnumbering a 100 to 1 is always nice.
New tactics like blitz krieg really ain't all that new. They are just an attempt at getting to situation 2. Wether or not that is achieved depends on the enemy. Blitz krieg both worked and not worked for the germans. It all depended on how prepared the enemy was. It isn't superiour tactics and technology that decides a battle, it is how inferior the enemy is.
But nonetheless the americans keep trying to change the rules of war, day light raids over germany despite the fact that the RAF had found it to be suicide. Operation market garden launched because surely the germans that had walked all over europe couldn't resist the americans. The resources spend could have been used to strengthen the front. The battle of bulge might not have been so dramatic if troops had not been depleted.
In vietnam america again tried to change the rule of war, the rule that you must hold ground to control it. We all now how well that one went. America got its ass spanked by a tiny pisspoor country. And not just in the jungle. The air war and tank wars were not nearly as one sides as american propaganda would want you to believe.
And now this new mobile army. With the abrahams the americans finally have themselves a tank that can be counted (all their previous efforts were a joke compared to the enemies weapons german and later russian). It is big, it is hard and it works. But it ain't sexy. Like the A-10 wich was so succesfull in the first gulf war it lacks the support of the think tanks back in safe america were there are no enemies shooting at you and the need for thick armour isn't as apparent as when a tank shell is exploding less then a meter away.
As the commander of the peach operation said. If it had been a force of strikers at the bridge they would have takes serious casualties. Notice how all the burned out vehicles from RPG attacks are bradleys and humvees. Not main battle tanks. They can shrug off such an attack and keep the soldiers inside safe and capable of killing the attacker.
But it ain't sexy. The striker is. Just like dropping tiny squads from a helicopter surrounded by enemies with no line of supply is sexy. Just like dropping lots of troops straight into enemey terrain with reinforcements depending entirely on wether the enemey decides to fight back. Just like sending thousaands of soldiers running up a beach into machine gunfire without any of those silly inventions those brits have (hobats funnies) was sexy. Just like sending slow and level flying bombers in daylight over germany was sexy.
US soldiers. You are equipped with weapons made by the lowest bidder and commanded by people who want a sexy war, not a dirty victory. Either you are the most brave or your the most stupid. T
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Interesting "statistic." I wonder how you or your source came up with those numbers. Just what is considered civilian and what is considered military?
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
> Iraq's ratio of civilian to miltary fatalities
> is currently running at about 33 to 1, and
> there is no reason to think that trend will
> not continue.
Based on today's iraqbodycount.org figures, that means that there have been between 438768 and 507441 Iraqi military fatalities.
And people wonder why there's a widespread insurgency. Each one of those fatalities will have friends/relatives, and some of those guys *will* hold a grudge.
This however becomes totally useless if the vehicle is in an ambush. Wether it is on patrol or guarding a roadblock its speed has become totally useless to avoid enemy fire. If it is guarding its speed is zero and if its patrolling then either it is moving so fast it can't see anything or going to slow it is easy to hit.
This entire idea of speed is based on the movies idea of a rebel base. A base out in the open wich can be surrounded and then these fast attack vehicles driving around and shooting the camp up. Of course the enemy is totally incapable of hitting a moving target but all the rpg's round come really close to make some exciting pictures of the attack vehicle driving through an explosion.
As the forces in iraq are seeing this is not how it really is. All of a sudden there is a flash and a bang and an rpg is on its way to a target. Now I don't know the exact speed but I very doubt this attack vehicle can out manouver an rpg round.
The images of destroyed vehicles seem to support my view. Don't let the glossy brochure fool you. What matters is the performance on the ground and so far it is piss poor.
As for putting armour on a truck, is this really such a crazy idea? Always in every battle there has been a problem with the supply convoys being to vulnrable on the last mile. Why not just take an existing tank, gut out its insides and let it do the last mile run of supplies. Yes it is more expensive but you would instantly solve a centuries old problem. Perhaps it just ain't sexy enough.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
These would be the same insurgents who, at a rally, held up banners containing Bart from Sesseme Street nect to Osama bin Laden. Whilst they probably do have a general feel for US sentiment, and probably ARE aiming to damage morale at home as well as on the battlefiled (well, ALL generals do that!), they probably don't have day-to-day or even month-to-month snapshots of American sentiment.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The residents of Fallujah would probably be very pleased to hear that and are no doubt awaiting the implementation of "acceptable conventions".
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Apparently, the head of the Christian Coalition was told by Bush that there would be no US casualties in the Iraqi war. It's hard to be sure if the claim is true, but given it's a major Bush ally, I'm inclined to take it at face value.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, I wouldn't call creation of a state which lasted some 1000 years, more than 400 of it pretty close to its maximum size, "lack of success". Galia: completely latinised, Spain - the same, (Northern) Africa, including Egypt - the same. Hell, 1000 years after the Fall of the Western Empire, Greeks in Byzantium still called themselves "Romans". I would say Romans were doing pretty well as occupants. Of course, we have to remember their few remarkable failures: German tribes (due to huge political and diplomatic mistakes during the rule of Tyberius), Palestine (due to incredible resistance of Jews, based mostly on Jews' sense of being "the Chosen Nation", so based on religion) and few others. But as a whole Romans did pretty well.
What was their way?
- "divide et impera": play on disputes between your opponents
- be cruel to rebels but reward loyalty
- don't destroy, rather modify (for example: don't change customs, religion, just add yours)
- leave local elite in charge, just add some control over them
- show possibility of becoming "a Roman" - with all good things coming with it.
And so on...
So basically as little change as possible, as long as they pay the taxes, let Roman goods in, provide soldiers, and don't talk about seccesion. And let "the Roman way" creep in into their lifes, slowly...
I think it worked, especially considering means of communication in those times: it is in some way much closer now from NY to Baghdad than it was from Rome to Lyon or Athenes.
Raf
c) Teach them how to establish peace next to winning a war.
The most telling footage I saw about this was just a week after the open warfare ceased. On my network I first saw a British roadblock in Basra where the soldiers didn't wear helmets and had their guns on their back. The day after that I saw footage from an American roadblock in Bagdad with the soldiers in full army gear, wearing helmets and with their guns pointed at anyone who approached. That moment convinced me that the American troops were in considerable trouble as they didn't seem to have the slightest clue on how to approach a benevolent occupation. The British soldiers took the risk of being friendly, the Americans hid behind their firepower. Currently the Basra area is considerably less hostile than the Bagdad area. You reap what you sow.
I tend to disagree with that argument. Obviously the need to shift troops around quickly was of importance, but IMHO the far more influential aspect was the way they governed. The export of values and language proved a far greater pacifier than the threat of force could ever be. Empires based on fear alone soon fall.
Forget all the hippy nonsense about laying down your arms and abolishing war. Forget all the hawks with their tanks and bombs. If you really want to stop war, give them free access to MTV, Coca-Cola and consumer electronics.
Ideology always crumbles in the face of consumerism.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
More accurately, had Iraq not invaded Kuwait, or had the UNSC stuck to just pushing the Iraqi's back into Iraq and not trying to force Iraq to give up their CBW's and delivery systems (permantly), or had Iraq complied with the resolutions leveled against it, or had France Germany Russia or China simply backed their previous agreements and not constantly fight against upholding resolutions that they (excluding germany) had agreed to in the first place. Or finally had the US foolishly decided that sanctions and "containment" were really (despite the evidence to suggest otherwise) working and to continue to stick it's head, ostrich like, in the sand and sung "La la la la la I'm not listening!!" . Oddly enough, Israel doesn't figure in this fiasco at all, so your last comment is as inaccurate and irrelevant as your first comment.
No matter how you measure it? You must be on crack. These random bombings have been going on as far as I remember.
Just in the last month there have been bombings in France, Egypt, indonesia, israel, palestine, and of course all over Iraq. That's just in one month. Since the start of the war (when saddam left power) there have been devestating bombings all over the world. remember Bali, Spain, and the hotel bombing in kenya.
The Corsicans have been bombing France for the past couple of decades. The '97 bomb killed twice as many in Egypt as the more recent bombing did. You think Israel has only been suffering bomb attacks since the last month? The Bali bomb was over 2 years ago... hence still during Saddams reign. Similar with Kenya, their worst being 1998 and 2002.
Anyway, trying to tie it to Saddam makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHAT SO EVER. That's like saying for the English we were getting bombed by the IRA when Saddam was still in power and after he was removed we aren't any more... therefore by our measure the world is a better place after Saddam had been removed. There is no connection.
Let's hear it for the 'good old Saddam days', when we only had events such as 9/11, genocides across central Europe (Bosnia, Serbia, etc), and probably the same amount of bombings as before. Absolute tosh.
The world is much worse off since Saddam has been removed from power no matter how you measure it.
You are wrong, imho. Iran and Libya have been scared into stopping their nuclear programs, the US now knows who its real allies are (eg they used to count France as an ally), and the straw man of the "war on terror" has seen new alliances and even Putin declare solidarity (in a manner) with Bush. I personally think the world is a better place. Then again, I'm not frightened of my own shadow thinking there is a terrorist hiding around every corner. If you believe media propaganda, every person in an online chat room is a paedophile. You need to be able to step back to see the world as it really is.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
"Indeed, months into the reality zone Rumsfeld was still scolding reporters for calling it a resistance movement."
why am i looking at that as envisioning the iraqi information minister?
"there are no resistance fighters in iraq. they are all bending over to thier new god, american-owned capitalism"
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
American radio tranmissions (including operations orders) were obviously unencrypted as well, since Russian intel experts (I think retired hobbyists) were listening in and posting what was going to happen on the internet (on iraqwar.ru).
Sorry, your math is totally out.
There has been around 1,200 military US deaths in Iraq (compared to the British forces which I don't think is even past 10 or 20 now, even though they have around 15% of the amount of US troops deployed).
Times that by 33 and you get 39,600 civilian deaths.
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First of all, our conversion to wizbang technology (in the Army) was fractured and sped up to forcibly come into use before it should have been implemented. When 4th ID was the experimental Division (see Task Force XXI), capitalism reared its worst face, we had separate contractors building separate non-compatible Operating Systems, data formats, programs and features. All contracts for products that not only failed to communicate with each other, but failed to even do their own job individually.
Why? (trying not to laugh at the sickness), because these businesses made more money recreating the wheel, deploying more techs to fix the problems, building inter-operability software, dragging out testing phases, making new versions, doing revamps, upgrades, and deploying new gimmicks to squeeze yet another cash loaf out of uncle sam while Joe Intel Soldier tries to place a (insert expletive) unit on a digi-map that his buddy in the next brigade headquarters can see on his screen. Not to mention the fact that keeping these systems running and networked was so insanely comical (and mysterious) that it became common knowledge that well-paid civilian tech support would be put on the plans as deploying with these systems into combat zones. The growing pains of just getting one unit icon on another system was enough to make any operator sick to his/her stomach.
Don't even get me started (too late) on how insanely foul it is that these systems were created mostly linearly in the unit structure, and the data that trickled down to smaller operational units had to either be transferred into paper, read over the radio or sent in a data format with the result of duplicate units on maps, malconfigured message formats, and the like. The bottom line is, my ASAS system couldn't effectively give the battle commanders the picture of the battlefield. Ok, now add onto that the fact that no one (outside of pentagon think-tanks and contractor money-grubbers) trusts these systems, so we -also- had to do the paper, ink, and marker jobs and resort to the faithful radio to transfer the same exact information. Add onto it the need for line-of-sight for comms in order for any of this to be worth taking up precious space and time.
Eventually the systems were built to be somewhat interoperable, and later new and smaller contracts were made to build all-in-one package deals that did almost everything, only at a nearly worthless level task-wise, yet the original systems continued to be the norm. The wheels keep on spinning but the ground is nowhere in sight.
Things have changed a little since I left active duty in 2000, but my buddy who went to Iraq with 4th ID said for the most part, that his unit didn't even use the majority of the systems they had, and I don't blame them. He said many of the problems have yet to be ironed out, for the same old reasons.
Oh, one more thing, we have all these nifty systems.. but try finding any of them in the National Guard. Nill, my friends. We're still banging rocks together and hoping Private Duff learns morse code soon (I exaggerate but you get my point).
I would venture that rather than the fanatics lashing out after the war in Iraq it is the US lashing out after 9/11, this is not entirely unexpected but is a little mis-directed.
/.
As pointed out Islam had a problem with fanatics before 9/11, true followers of Islam, I know some, are very peaceful and respectful people.
Its a shame that the poster posted as AC as this is one of the more intelligent rants that is likely to appear on
In the end, It's all bovine dung you know
... the supposition I heard a few years back that the EMF generated from a nuclear bomb would knock out the avionics of any US plane in the same theatre? About the only thing left flying would be MiGs apparently - and the USAF don't have (m)any of those in service. I also remember the latest british anti-aircraft batteries in the Falklands that were deadly to inbound aircraft - but only if they came into range one at a time. More lives probably got saved by buying the right people off rather than aiming smart bombs at their subordinates. A very low tech solution :-)
Ian W.
I remember an interview with a British officer, where they explained why they were wearing berets instead of helmets. He said the moment they arrived they switched from helmets to berets to appear more human and 'with' rather than 'against' the local population. They received a bulletin where it was stated there was an increased risk to troops. They wore helmets for one day and the officer ordered them back into berets, despite the increase in risk to British lives, as they instantly perceived increased hostility from the locals. This kind of intelligence is worth its weight in gold.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Oh and you got the quot wrong but other have already correted that.
Was the cold war WW3? No many people didn't die but they did die on either side of two bitter enemies one of who was defeated and the other who has won.
The cold war as High-Tech so high-tech that the weapons didn't even have to kill people, instead they killed an economy. In WW2 raids were done on factories, storage areas and infrastructure to damage the enemies economy. The cold war saw increased use of weapons so the other side either had to overload their economy or loose the war.
If you count the cold war as a real war and I do then it was also WW3.
The what we got now is WW4. America came out on top in WW3 but finds itself now in a war that started with a couple of knifes. No enemy can defeat americans in scientific weapons but so far more americans been killed with a couple of stanley knifes then have been killed by weapons the previous 3 world wars.
Yeah yeah I know, the theory is full of holes but science has succeeded in making one side so strong that it has instead become extremely weak.
Of course part of the weakness on the american side is that they value human life. If bush was really the evil in human form that many claim he is he would simply carpet bomb iraqie cities.
War cannot be won. War can only be not lost. On either side in this conflict are some extremists but I ask you this. Under bush you can protest. Do you really think you can do the same under Al Quada? Many muslim nations wouldn't even allow a site like this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
NO.
You think that muslims are beheading old men and woman in Thailand has to do with the war in Iraq?
Absolutely
How quickly we forget history. Terrorism actually dropped after 9/11. We went into Afghanastan (kinda) and low and behold, much of what was going on in the world slowed down. Then we invaded Iraq. The speed with which we moved in was frightening. and IIRC, there were few reports of terrorism during that time. But since that time, the number and attempts have risen at a quick pace. There is a direct corellation between # of world-wide attacks and our being bogged down by a small group in iraq.
Sorry, but this has everything to do with the war in Iraq, and nothing to do with 9-11. Until last week, when Iraq pledge to work with Al Qaeda.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While these numbers may be true, war has also changed with each one.
The battlefield has moved from trenches and country side to the city.
In ww1 & ww2 both sides were prepared for war, so civilians and military were not mixed as they are today.
Another point is this:
As a general rule, on a 'normal' battlefield you need to be 3 to 1 in order to win. (If the enemy has 10 men, you need 30 to win.)
In the city the rate is 10+ to 1. Soldiers know about this great risc, and this is why you shoot first, ask later.
And as we all know civilians live in the city, so it is no surprise that more civilians die in modern combats. They can't escape, and 'non regular' armys use them as cover.
The fact that everyone and his brother in Iraq owns a gun does not make things easier.
I only read slash. for the articles...
Well, yes, they are currently enjoying the benefits of modern warfare, as he explained already. Older methods would have probably involved razing the entire place.
"If the situation would be reversed; if a technologically superior force invaded and occupied the country we live in and enforced the same type of government that exist in Iraq today, wouldn't you try to fight back until the enemy was gone, no matter what?"
Quintus: "People should know when they're conquered"
Maximus: "Would you? Would I?"
Iran and North Korea are moving their nuke programs at full speed. In fact, both have sped up when we first invaded Iraq (but that could have more to do with getting information from the pakastani minister).
EU is trying to get Iran to stop, but considering that Russia is helping Iran out with supplies, they are not likely to do much. Israel will almost certainly have no choice but to go in and do the job themselves with our bunker busters. When they do, the middle east will go crazy.
Apparently, Libya never made any progress and had given up nukes during Clinton's time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Basically, for all their "smart" weapons, the military have become much, much less efficient at killing soldiers. That is because instead of lining up all the combatants in a field where they can battle it out (almost 100% of the dead being soldiers), politicians now think it is ok to bomb cities in the hope that there might be some enemy soldiers among the rubble and slaughtered innocents.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
If you read WW2 accounts you can see a real line of difference between the older men in the first wave and the young kids who came as the replacements. And it wasn't just that the veterans had aged, the new ones were several years younger then the men they replaced.
But the best soldiers of all were the special forces. Often adult men around 30 years old. These men don't need all that shouting drill sergeant crap. If you need a drill sergeant hollering in your ear to drive you then perhaps you are just not motivated enough. I never been in battle but from what I have heard, read and seen the number of drill sergeants running beside you under fire can be counted on the fingers of a very poor grenade thrower.
I was however drafted and noticed a real difference between the squad I was in and another squad. We had one of weirdo but luckily he was arrested for weed possesion by the MP's and the rest of us while not exactly happy to be there were smart enough to know that the faster you do something the quicker it will be over.
No need for shouted orders or insults if the soldiers are motivated either by a desire to get back inside or for a love for their country.
In fact I think that those soldiers who need a lot of shouting should be kicked out. They are the kind of soldiers that cause vietnam. Totally lacking in any self-discipline. Wich soldier would you rather have beside you. Someone with self-discipline or someone who needs shouting and punishment to do anything?
Oh and note that I am not against encouragement shouting like say during a long forced march. That is a totally different thing but I am sure you understand that as well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
> the US now knows who its real allies are (eg they
... even if he gets a punch in the face.
> used to count France as an ally),
A friend is someone who will try to take away the keys from someone who wants to drive drunk
An enemy is someone who will help a drunk driver into a car and encourage him to go drag racing down a busy street.
So tell me, which countries are America's *real* friends.
I wonder how you or your source came up with those numbers. Just what is considered civilian and what is considered military?
As I understand it, the figures are compiled from a combination of hospital records when they are available and incidents verified by at least two separate press agencies otherwise. I agree the counts are not likely to be accurate, but since the US military won't supply figures ("We don't do body counts," Gen. Tommy Franks) they're the best available.
That's not to read malice into those disproportionate casualty figures though. I wouldn't suggest the US is not trying to reduce collateral damage, but that it shows their priority was to avoid American casualties.
Civilian casualties were kept relatively low considering this was an invasion of a country with a population of twenty five million, but even fewer soldiers were killed considering the scale of the event, hence the statistic.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Hello? Daylight precision bombing? Carpet bombing was used for two reasons: either the bombing force wanted to spread as much terror as possible, or it was night and they couldn't see the actual target.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I agree with the spirit of what you are saying. But it is important to remember that war is a calamity for everyone involved. Once it does happen, it needs to be finished quickly because, as we are learning now in Iraq, the longer it goes on the worse it gets.
The lesson I draw from this is that either (a) we needed to consider the consequences of invading Iraq more carefully or (b) we needed to invade Iraq with a force sufficient to produce swift and complete victory, which would have included imposing order on the entire country before the resistance had time to organize. What we got was neither: we got the results of wishful thinking.
War is very, very bad. If it were up to me we'd never have gone in. HOwever, inefficient and unskillful war is even worse, especially for the civilians.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
6. Disbanding the Iraqi army. 250.000 young males without a job. Riots in Baghdad.
I agree with your points, but the 6th point is particurally interesting because it hasn't been talked much. What kind of idiots the US commanders must have been to order such thing? Why dispand a cheap work force who can help you to secure the country? Why let them go home, get pissed and return back as rebels?
To make matters worse, the Allies understood this in 1945. The German army wasn't totally disbanded, but part of it was used to help to secure and rebuild the country. They realized this 50 years ago. Where's that wisdom gone? Perhaps in 1945 US listened to British, who are known to be able handle these kind of problems. Or perhaps nowadays people expect that technology solves their problems.
Anonymous European
Until last week, when Iraq pledge to work with Al Qaeda.
Minor nit, it was the Tawhid and Jihad leader Abu Mussab al Zaqawi that pledged alliegiance to Al Queda. Previously this organization was not aligned with al Qaeda.
Sure your point is true... if you only look at the ratio. But is that ratio going up because more civilians are suffering casualties, or because US troop casualties have fallen. The truth is that both have fallen over time, but the casualties to US troops were even lower, especially given the "less capable" enemy they faced.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Of course if it had been a success then it would have been different.
My point was that is was very much an american motivation to have it attempted all with the idea that the germans didn't amount to much and that the boys could be home before christmas.
More accurate would be that their was an initial plan devised by the english montogommery but that together with the americans this became market garden wich was far more ambitious then the original plan.
It would have been totally impossible to pull of without the american airborne troops who had nothig to do after normandy. (as seen in band of brothers they were in england) How exactly market garden became so overly ambitious and so reliant on the germans not resisting the ground advance is to complex for me. My world view blaims the americans. I never claimed to be un-biased. Although if you look at the bit in band of brothers what really was at fault was Political Correctness, the order to cause minimum damage caused their withdrawal. One of many delays that meant the final bridge was a bridge to far.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
'Romanes eunt domus' 'People called romans, they go the house???' 'It says "Romans go home"' 'No it doesn't' ....
There is no such thing as 'chocohol' or 'workahol'.
The problem is that there have been a lot of racist books written about arabs and muslims..
That's funny, I haven't seen any of these, but I have seen a number of books describing how arab/muslim culture is thouroughly corrupt, self-destructive, and an obvious dead end.
That's not racist, because no one is saying "Damn doon-coones are a bunch of murdering terrorists from birth," but they are saying that their culture- LEARNED BEHAVIORS -leads to suppression of women, backwards thinking, economic failure, brutal regimes, and all around a horrible way to live.
A little over 100 years ago we came in full contact with a society that had nothing on western civilization- feudal, warrior-ruled, emperor worshipping, and about equivalent with europe 500 years ago. The country was called Japan. Instead of turning their backs on a way of life that offered a great deal of benefits, they eagerly embraced the ways of people better than them militarily, in terms of organization, production, etc. Now they are undisputably the equal- if not the better- of many european countries.
The Arab's culture, however, is very face/shame based, and they have been unable to admit they have been bettered by western civilization. That's just one of their problems.
So don't talk to me about 'racist' books that describe their culture as a corrupt failure, because culture can be easily disconnected from skin color.
The current position of Arab nations in the world, when compared to European and many Asian countries makes it clear they are failures in the modern world. These particular losers have chosen to strike out.
(Losers hijack airplanes full of civilians to carry out their war. Winners have an air force.)
People are just people, no matter what the skin color. Cultures can be (and are) quite depraved and dysfunctional. We see alot of that in the middle east.
Oh, by the way, if you still think I'm racist after skimming over how their culture is horrible, then it is you who links behavior to skin color, and that makes you the racist.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
In fact, al Zaqawai hated Al Qaida and wanted NOTHING to do with them. We are forcing many here to choose between Al Qaida or the US. When we are the good guys and stayed out of others lives (and their country), then groups/ppl would rather align with us. Now that we invaded a country and we have made their lives FAR worse than it was under sadaam, they are switching to Al Qaida. A lot of damage has been done.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I prefer the senile wrestler theory.
Sure it helps when the "insurgent" or whomever is an Irate Iraqi, but some of them aren't. The are a large number (50%?) of the "resistance" are really just jihadists from neighboring countries that are there to "kill the infidels". The Iraqi's don't want them there, not even many of the native Iraqi insurgents.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Doesn't this fit the exact description for the US actions ? I mean where is the cause now ? Weapons of mass destruction ? if spreading democracy is the key thing for Bush Inc. then why their neighbor is still a communist ? Can't they convert them first and set a good example ? Well I guess cuba doesn't have any natural resources that could be plundered by spreading democracy.
No Sig for you.!
'Ya know, I thought about your last statement and you're right. It's not just the job of the military personnel to die; it's all of ours. It wasn't a tech heavy coordinated event with veteran combat soldiers that drove Britain out of the (just beginning) US. It was farmers, children and idealists. The result? A lot of dead non-soldiers and a new start for a burgeoning country. I'm not speaking of the US 2004, rather than the actual day we became independent. That must have been quite a sight that day. Now, we have the privilege of volunteering for military service; that wasn't the case then. Now, people die in combat as they did back then; same ol', same ol'. I wonder if you would think that way if America were somehow invaded. Unlikely, yes; but we didn't think 4 jets would take down 2 mega-structures and a portion of the Pentagon either. Bottom line: if you join the military then expect to perform a job that may be unpopular and expect to die at the request of the Commander and Chief; right or wrong. As ex-military myself, I wish I could go but apparently I'm too damn old. Things may change with another attack though; God forbid. I'm still here though and willing to go the distance. I also agree that we can support our troops without supporting the war; however soldiers in the field don't have that luxury. Anti war demonstrations, speeches from un-informed college students and POS politicians all have an effect on personnel serving during wartime. They may not get spit upon (Vietnam? Thanks Jane) when they return, however they can still hear and read comments from the very people they're fighting for. Do I want our servicemen to die? NO; but they did sign up and it's the duty of this populace to give any kind of support necessary to ensure that one less military person dies; including shutting the hell up when necessary. Give 100% or nothing because that's what the troops need; not someone saying "Hey, I love you guys but you're fighting for a POS cause and the person sending you off to war is a POS; do you need any cookies?". Outside of that it's just another Vietnam and we lost that one at home; not in the the paddy fields or jungles.
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
All kinds of war? The war against Hitler was wrong? The war against Japan? Please...
Isn't al Zaqawai Jordanian? If so aren't your point about invading his country and the grandfather post's point about Iraq joining with al Qaeda kinda wrong?
I've always taken the view that the verb form is not the important bit (though if you took that view, you have obviously shown that it still doesn't make a lot of sense). It's the argument form that is.
The logical fallacy in the exercise, I think, is to blame any general problem on human error (so ending everything with "people cause problem") simply because it's a good source of problems.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Probably shouldn't even suggest it. I can see Military Intelligence going, "Hmmmm....well?"
I don't know. Most of the intelligence-gathering technology is classified.
I don't think it's fair to rule it out as a cause of problems just because human error might be one, though.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
you wouldn't support the troops either way. If there were a draft you'd be singing about how much THAT sucked.
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
How many thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians do you have to kill like this before the world really gets upset with the US. The reports I'm aware of the Russian school hostage crisis crumbled because the hostage takers started arguing over it being wrong to kill children like this. I think the objections in the US would be even stronger.
If the US were to start killing civilians in such a manner, it will breed even more terrorism with the attitude "The US must be stopped no matter the what". And it won't be just the axis of evil saying that, it will be almost everyone.
Saddam did have ties to al Qaeda. He is well documented as a supporter of Palestinian terrorists. He has not, however, been shown to have a connection to 9/11... But who said he did?
Replace Saddam with the Bush family and the same statement would be true.
I suppose you are talking about crown prince Abdullah. Could you say more about this?
Give Ahmed some credit!
He told the president and the pentagon that invading Iraq would be so easy that no plan would be necessary (provided, of course) that Ahmed be made president of the "new Iraq"!
Just enter
"ahmed chalabi" "richard perle"
into Google and be enlightened.
For another "dynamic duo", enter
"richard perle" "conrad black"
just for amusement, this time.
Saddam (or members of his regieme most certainly hosted and met with high level AQ officials. What the report DOES say is that Saddam had no direct connections to the 9-11 attack in particular or to Osama himself. But he certainly did have some AQ connections.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
"Or finally had the US foolishly decided that sanctions and "containment" were really (despite the evidence to suggest otherwise) working"
Actually, all the evidence said it was working. And that evidence, after the invasion of Iraq was proved to be correct. The "War" was instigated on forgeries (which the politicians were warned about, but studiously ignored the warnings), tenuous at that (the bulk of evidence and intelligence pointed to sanctions and containment having worked, with only one small (forged) document supporting a cause to invasion).
The resolutions were pretty much upheld, with an odd bit of leniency for humanitarian reasons. Iraq paid dearly for it's invasion of Kuwait. Oddly, the US and UK now expect adulation for performing exactly the same kind of action upon the Iraqis that Iraq performed on the Kuwaitis. Well, not the US and the UK, just their politicians.
So, the foolishness and sticking the head ostrich-like into the ground was what actually caused the invasion, not prevented it.
Also, the comments about Israel in the grandparent, I suspect, are being linked to a wider picture that's linked to Iraq, but not, perhaps in the main frame of this debate. There again, I don't really know enough on that to comment much, I just read both sides of it in interest, and follow up research on it later.
Whatever the problems in Israel, U.S. government involvement does not help, but makes things much, much worse.
U.S. government leaders have very unsophisticated understandings of other cultures. Here's an example of someone with a simplistic understanding: Senator Biden says the Saudi government cannot continue in power without U.S. government support.
--
Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.
Well as usual, these "threads" just trail off into irrelevent nothingness. I _was_ talking about technical "failings" in Iraq. But if you want to talk about hard drives, there are environmental and fair trade issues that you have to gloss over because you "need" a new one. We all do it all the time. On the other hand, Slashdot _always_ links the technology of Windows with the "immoral" actions of Microsoft. We're just selective about these things.
Is this sig nificant?
"Civilians" and "Military" personnel are no longer that well defined. How do you re-define that? How about "combatants"; or do you prefer "terrorists"?
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
It becomes very hard to "convince" them to do anything. You can't have it both ways, Europe wants the US to take the lead on all the military/peacekeeping stuff, but then when the US doesn't do everything exactly and only how THEY want it, then not only do they disagree, but the motives are called into question, (eg War for Oil, Bush=Hilter, US=imperialist, etc). If it were simply a matter of respectful disagreement, that would be one thing, but actively working AGAINST them (and for Hussein) is a whole nother song, chapter, and verse.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Politics isn't all that simple.
I don't like Bush, I think he's stupid, a liar, and quite possibly one of the worst presidents the US has ever had.
But remember the president isn't a man, he's a whole team.
His administration has made good progress in at least parts of some issues. He isn't as big a protectionist as Kerry, even though there is a lot of pressure to just "Ban Offshoring".
I think he's making a mess out of Iraq, but he did a pretty good job in Afghanistan, gaining international support to invade and to rebuild.
As for intelligent and education correlating, I don't quite agree. In your 20's young and idealistic and at college, you see some of the mess and get an idea of how it can be fixed, by voting for these liberal guys. They've got it figured out!
They'll strengthen the unions and save jobs, and make the company uncompetative till the US steel industry collapses.
Lets build an expensive system of social programs to help the poor. But this is expensive, so we'll raise taxes, leaving less money available to invest in a new manufacturing facility to give those same people jobs.
It's never just a simple issue, it's a serious stack of complex trade offs.
"Whether or not we should have gone over there has *nothing* to do with how or why technology failed."
The Navy's super-expensive Aegis system caused the U.S. Navy to shoot down a civilian airliner, remember? The technology failed because the U.S. government system allows high-profit junk technology, paid for with the hard-earned money of U.S. citizens.
It would be possible to give many, many other examples.
Those who are angry and don't know it are easily manipulated.
--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.
Looks like 50 million people are going to be left enjoying living with Uranium dust in their back yards for the next 4.5 Billion years to come: Living with DU contaminated earth.
Not to mention the millions of Agent Orange victims. As most americans don't have the guts or patriotism to see or look at what they collectively are responsible for having done to others on this planet, I decided to put these links here.
Anyway, this details how technology horribly fails at providing any cleanup to the real innocent civilian victims, who are mostly children: http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/ud_main.html the cost in human lives is going to be absolutely astronomical. The dead count on Iraqi side is around 1.5 million now, according to United Nations figures.
Check out the pictures. Those wishing to simply Kill'em All, might want to put them on your walls, as that is exactly what America may be doing there. - There is no way to clean that place up anymore.
let me just say that its a damned good thing that your type haven't figured out how to weaponize human relationships .. yet.
Oh, but they have! Well at least the americans. Haven't you ever heard of project "MK ultra"?
Let me tell you this. Jim Jones was involved in it. The project was about controlling the mind of people after enough exposure to the controlling agents. A quick search on Google may give you more info.
I think the project also involved drugs, but I'm not sure. What creeps me out is that apparently the US aren't wanting to use this project to control the ENEMY, but their own citizens. (Ironically, most cults tend to believe in conspiracy theories, unaware that they might be part of one as well.)
So, did MK-ultra teach the govt some things? Well, yeah. Just look at 9/11 and how people were blinded by fear into letting Bush invade Iraq. Terrorist threatens, varying information, etc... and the citizens were completely fooled. Summarizing, did MK-ultra help the govt win the war vs Iraq? Yes, it has. You can't win a war you can't start in the first place.
Don't believe me. Just read some literature about destructive cults, like Steve Hassan (cult expert and exit counselor) or M.L. Tobias.
but the date stated by the article, says this happened way over a year ago. why wait till now to bring it up?
When the sun came up that morning, the sight of the cost in human life the Iraqis paid for that assault, and burning vehicles, was something I will never forget," Marcone says. "It was a gruesome sight. You look down the road that led to Baghdad, for a mile, mile and a half, you couldn't walk without stepping on a body part."
Yet just eight U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously, during the bridge fighting. Whereas U.S. tanks could withstand a direct hit from Iraqi shells, Iraqi vehicles would "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, Gordon puts things bluntly: "If the army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would have been killed." At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't information armor, but armor itself.
These last two paragraphs were the best part of the entire article. Obviously the initial poster didn't have the ass to make it through the whole thing.
The US military budget is insane, but I read stuff like this and I'm glad for 'our boys' sake that they have the best equipment and training.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
Isn't al Zaqawai Jordanian?
If thats true then it means your grandfather's post is more vindicated. The point is that now the enemies of the enemies of the US are now becoming the friends of the enemies of the US. And it gets worse if thats these forces are not localized to Iraq. It means they are uniting on a regional if not global scale.
There is a learning curve. The amount of change in all forms of military technology in the last ten years is amazing. It takes time to integrate this into the tactics of each unit. What is actually needed and how to use it. This is not a simple process like in a video game, we are talking about real lives, the only battle expense that counts. You run into the age factor (old dog, new tricks) the younger people adapt faster.
Most industries are facing the same problems.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
the US now knows who its real allies are (eg they used to count France as an ally)
I'm sorry to have to point to you that ally does not imply complice
Appart from this, I agree with (most of) your argument.
We fire depleted uranium darts. Think of the
biggest lawn dart you've ever seen, but thicker.
The shaft is about an inch thick.
Shells and tiny missles can also be fired, but
the darts are most popular.
The idea of the combat zone as some defined place wherer one can bring tank support is not consistant with an guerilla war where the enemy can attack almost anywhere. It would be easier and less expensiveto add some protection than to add the number of protectin vehicles in the convoys. 20 tons? One can get some very good protection from 500 kilo (probably even less).
And it's not just the armor issue with the truck. Bad brakes and lack of good seatbelts makes it dangerous to drive. These are issues that has been known for 15 years and only know are they getting around to fix it.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
It's amazing to read how, according to some armchair generals who earned their military credentials by reading anti-US essays pouring out from the far left, the sky is falling because in one battle of the Iraqi war a surprised American force totally destroys an Iraqi force several times its size and in the process suffers only 8 lightly wounded soldiers.
... wait! ... that's what they are doing!
Yessir! And I'll bet that if they concentrate all their reporting on activities of terrorists operating in the Suni triangle, adding a little "the sky is falling" slant, they could make it appear as if the whole country were on the verge of collapse.
But in the end, when you're talking killing somebody or destroying a vehicle in a straight fight, the guy with the bigger gun, the thicker armor and the better training is the guy who's going to win
It's not about hitting your opponent, and it's not about not being hit. It's about having sufficient force in the right place at the right time, with the right orders.
Almost all fights are decided before the first blow. That's why intelligence is so important, and good military commanders live be this... they always have.
Intelligence is the greatest weapon in warfare - it has always been decisive. The US army is just trying to push the envelope.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
My neighbor makes his living selling MS networking solutions between ships, ground and satellite based communication points. I asked if they considered unix based OS. The US gov't specified "off-the-shelf" solutions in the bid documents. This for ship-ship, ship-shore during battlefield conditions. I could not believe it.
The first question that also popped into my mind. Five to ten thousand men? say it ain't so! not even a sniff about it until now. Realistically five to ten thousand men would be an ideal scenario for the US forces. All those men gathered to get killed through airstrikes. I suspect it was far less.. or more spread out over a large area but from what we saw most of the iraqi army was non existent or surrended.
did you forget to take your meds?
Faraday cage.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I think it's a combination of both, though I for the most part wouldn't call it "human error" to kill with a gun or otherwise. I say this because while there certainly are a number of accidental deaths by gun in various countries, the presiding concern of most people is murder and wars. Now, blaming people for the act of murder is really to point out that guns don't have any control over themselves. The majority of killings by gun are intentional. So, it's hard to argue that guns are the trigger.
Instead, most people who are against gun either try to enlarge the threat of children shooting themselves or the easy access of a gun making a person more apt to commit murder (say, in a rage, which is often considered manslaughter and not murder). The former seems for the most part an invalid concern, as the same logic would say that children should be castrated until they're of "sufficient age" to prevent pregnancy--I'm deeply aware that pregnancy creates life, not destroys it, but sex, like guns, is dangerous to one's life if one isn't educated to take steps to understand and respect it. The latter is often based on statistics that show a higher murder rate, especially by guns, in the US vs other countries with stricter gun laws. The problem with that is some countries have basically a 180 vs the US. That is, for every US gun murder, there is a non-gun murder in an other country and vice versa for US non-gun murders.
So, maybe quick access to *any* weapon is likely to cause murder/manslaughter. Or maybe a strong part of the many murders is based on many countries, including the US, having a long history of settling disputes with weapons instead of words. It's sadly the case that some people in the US still feel justified in punching or worse a person for the words they say. Words can be ignored, but assault can not.
Back to the original form, most linking verbs form tautologies in self-reference. Chicken tastes like chicken and computers are made out of computers (the latter is true because while it's silly to make the statement, one member of the subset of something is itself). You're correct in that the form is intent on trying to place the second sentence as the main statement by placing a negative in the first instead of minimizing it. So, while guns do kill people, people kill people by more than guns. The conclusion that's intended to be drawn is that removing guns won't stop killing. Whether it reduces killing is another matter. The sentences are in effect a sound bite to validate why guns being banned isn't a complete solution to murder. But as such, you're right that not every idiom that fits the form makes sense. The form in itself is a contrivance and is not a proof. Proof comes from the reader self-validating what they read.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
,i>Because the war news is being controlled by spin doctors, not being reported in the sense that you and I think of reporting. You mean with your spin?
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
On that note, technology fails all the time. Almost enough to say that it is a property of technology.
Yep. Take modern military rifles, for example. They jam, they run out of ammo, they get smacked in the gas return tube and become single-shot rifles.
Even older technology, like the sword, has problems. They break. They rust (which makes them break more easily). They get dull and don't cut well any more.
A good rock, on the other hand, always works.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
How quickly we forget history. Terrorism actually dropped after 9/11
Where do you get your numbers? The Bali bombings occured after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq. I guess you think that it was just a minor blip? I wouldn't be suprised if the number of attacks have risen a bit since Iraq but that happens (hopefully temporarily) when you disturb the hornet's nest.
There is a direct corellation between # of world-wide attacks and our being bogged down by a small group in iraq.
Yep. Kindda like how there's a direct correleation between the number of terrorist attacks in the world and the number of security bulletins microsoft have released?
There were few reports[emph mine] of terrorism during that time
Or could it just be that these terrorist attacks have been going on for a long, long time (and they have) and the media is only reporting them now because it has become a US issue as well...? The conflicts in Thailand, Russia and indeed, all over the world, have been going on well before even 9/11. The terrorists are now in Iraq but it's not like they didn't exist before the invasion. I doubt that they were kindergarden teachers before 2003.
The number of terrorist attacks in Israel have dropped since the invasion of Iraq. Do you believe that there is a direct correlation there as well?
You are right of course. :-) The roman empire was very stable, due to the reasons you mentioned above and also the fact that nationalism was something unheard of in those days. The romans succeded in that respect, creating a long lasting and even prospering empire because they didn't create a nation, they created a network of trade centres. But resistance did remain, more in some areas than others, and being a Roman soldier meant the same thing then as to any occupational force: you ran the risk of getting killed for no other reason than being a Roman soldier.
Brits and Europeans "know how to handle these kind of problems"
Great job redrawing the Ottoman Empire! Israel/Palestine... Iraq/Kuwait... Cyprus... Most of Africa... Kashmir... Thank you wise ones. Americans have been blessed with Superpower status just in time to clean up Europe's Colossal Colonial Messes.
Now its our turn to screw things up.
And as we all know civilians live in the city, so it is no surprise that more civilians die in modern combats. They can't escape, and 'non regular' armys use them as cover.
And that makes it right?
The fact that everyone and his brother in Iraq owns a gun does not make things easier.
Maybe we should have thought about that, along with the 10+ to 1 ratio you mentioned above, before we went in.
Just because we don't have sufficient troops and we're in the middle of the city and everyone has a gun does not allow us to just spray the city with bullets. Did you ever read Black Hawk Down? The book cover calls it a heroic action. I call it a slaughter. If I weren't from the U.S., I'd hate Americans too.
I think you're thinking of the "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." slogan and trying to generalize it to fit other things.
It doesn't work. Let me provide you with some obviously false counter-examples:
Chicken doesn't taste like chicken. People taste like chicken.
Computers aren't made of silicon. People are made of silicon.
People don't make mistakes. People make mistakes.
As you can see, just making the claim isn't enough for it to be true. That last one doesn't even make sense.
What happens in Soviet Russia, though?
Palestine (due to incredible resistance of Jews, based mostly on Jews' sense of being "the Chosen Nation", so based on religion)
Dear Skinny Rav,
Liar!!
Yours Sincerely,
Yasser Arafat
I think you should read more about Arab culture. Perhaps you've heard of a city called Cordoba from say 900 years ago or more. Yes currently Arab culture may appear to be a bit backwards, but 900 years ago, the shoe was on the other foot. It was the Moors in Spain that had libraries, streets (lit by lamps), valued education when London was little more than a village. It was the Arabs that preserved the culture of the Greeks and Romans, by preserving their art and literature. It was the Arab culture of Cordoba that helped to spark the Renaissance. You may be asking yourself, what the hell does this have to do with now, well maybe nothting. I just think that before you go calling a culture "losers" maybe you should know that your "Western" culture may not exist without them.
Also, it is not the "preconceived notion" that solders can be sent of to die. But being in the military, I know it is my job to fight war. Also, you must understand that while people are protesting the war, that gives the people we are fighting hope to stick it out longer. The longer they stick out, the more of my buddies they blow holes into.
Do you really think the iraqi resistance cares what protesters all the way over here do? It's their homeland they are fighting for (from their perspective), they're going to fight to the last man no matter what. That's the way wars of occupation are.
You can also think about it this way: if no one protested wars, those in power would be far less reticent to send people to die in them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Sorry, please play the correlation is not causation game again.
American soldiers aren't willing to die for their beliefs just kill for them.
That underlies a terrible political ideology.
As technology improves the ratio of people killed in action on the two sides will increase.
When the American government doesn't even keep statistics on civilians killed in action and cries over losing 50 soldiers there is something terribly wrong.
Putting the anal back in analysis...
Eventually the massively inferior Shermans and T34s won due to sheer numbers, they were cheap and easy to make, as well as reliable.
Many tank aficionados consider the Russian T-34 to be the best overall balanced design of WW2 with the German Panther a close second.
A legend from Panzer commanders is that one German Tiger was better than 4 American Shermans (this was before the British Firefly version) but there was always a fifth Sherman.
A documentary illustrated the battlefield techniques of the Shermans and explained the tactics they used against the more heavily-armed and armoured German tanks.
Maybe someone has a better description or link, but the American tank crews sacrificed 3 or 4 Shermans to get in behind the Tiger (swarming) and hit it where its armour was weakest.
The Tiger was heavy and slow and had a slow turret rotation apparently.
"About 50% of those who died in WW2 were civilian, up from 10% in WW1."
How much of that was from the Eastern Front or the Japanese campaign in Manchuria, where the combattants made it a point to hit civillians?
I think a caveat should be made to your Roman Way point "don't destroy, rather modify (for example: don't change customs, religion, just add yours)". This was only the outcome Romans preferred when conquering new lands. If the locals didn't go along they had no problem exterminating the entire population which worked quite well. You mention the so-called incredible resistance of the Jews which is false at least insofar if you judge resistance by its success. The jews were completely and utterly crushed by the Roman nation where all the males were slaughtered and all females sold into slavery. I have no idea why you marked Roman rule over that area as a failure. I would agree that a big mistake was by the Romans in taking Germania which was mostly due to the incompetence of the varus who led 3 legions to their complete destruction in the teutoberg forest.
How is this incident conclusively a technology failure?
I read the article, and this sounds more like a human failure than a technological one. How did spotting and reporting three whole brigades require anything more advanced than, say, World War II-era technology? It seems reasonable to assume that a manuver element the size of a battalion, "at the very tip U.S. Army's final lunge north toward Baghdad" as described in the article, approaching a key strongpoint like that bridge, would've had some sort of reconnaisance available to it. If any air assets were available before 0300, they could've wrapped a note "Enemy in strength approaching objective" around a rock or something and dropped it on the bttn's position, for crying out loud. Or dropped flares, or sent a runner, or something.
I won't say there aren't problems with the technology, but from this article I can't tell whether this is a reconnaisance failure, a communications problem, or command-and-control breakdown. "Zero information getting to me" could be the result of a whole lot of different problems.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
In fact in % terms based on the number of troops the British and American forces have in place the British have had a similar % of fatalities.
In real terms that's around the 70 mark at the moment.
America counted on tech superiority in Vietnam, too, as well as a contrived, unpopular government. We were beaten because that strategy was good only for perpetuating the war, its corporate profiteering, and its nationalistic fearmongering. Sound familiar? Maybe that's because Vietnam was run by people including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, in the last "worst president ever" the Republican political machine inflicted on the world.
--
make install -not war
AOL?
At least it would be an honourable course of action, as Sean Connery has just said on TV now
"If men wish to fight they do so with swords so that they may see each others eyes, if it is 'inconvienient' to use swords then a man uses a rifle and still the matter is settled between men.
You Americans are not men, men do not need promiscuous devices shooting hundreds of rounds a second, men do not use guns to shoot at their enemy dozens of miles away. This is not the way men fight, nothing is settled - there is no honour in that."
Admittedly if you value winning more than honour then it's a stupid idea.
The TechReview article is titled "How technology failed in Iraq".
/. blurb quotes: "Between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles."
The failure? As the
The result of this failure? 8 American soldiers wounded in a battle that left a mile to a mile and a half stretch of road toward Baghdad so choked with Iraqi casualties that you couldn't walk without stepping on body parts.
Maybe the intelligence layer failed to warn the US, but that's only one technology. The US tank armor is also a technology, and it held up against direct hits by the Iraqi tanks. US tank rounds blew the Iraqi tanks to smithereens.
The Iraqis got slaughtered, the US took eight wounded, and this is a "failure"? With failure like that, who needs victories?
Surely there's other, better examples where intelligence failures cost the US more, but this ain't it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
As a fellow American, I also wish that there was "a clear moral distinction between the US military and terrorists," but I do not allow my emotions to cloud my logic in order to help me believe that my wish is granted.
"Shock" and "awe" are both synonyms for "terror."
Furthermore, the U.S. military doesn't even care about its own troops. Why have there been no Gulf War Syndrome studies of uranyl nitrates, which is what our soldiers and civilians end up breathing whenever depleted uranium shells or slugs burn in a nitrogen atmosphere, which dust scraped from them does spontaniously? Gulf War II syndrome is going to make agent orange look lik Sunny Delight.
Wake up and smell the oligarchy.
Yes because of course the residents of Fallujah would prefer firebombing.
You are making my point, previously it would have been accepted to just level a city that was resisting, now limited strikes and policing troops are all that is allowed.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
It's an interesting and valid topic but the summary write up is totally worded to cause FUD about the Iraq war. Put that stuff in the politics section so I can ignore it and let's talk about technology!
The U.S. has now tortured, killed, maimed and poisoned more Iraqi innocents in ONE year than Saddam did in 20.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Americans always carry on about kicking ass and how great their military is. This is only because you watch too many movies. You seem to forget that you usually get your asses kicked in these situations.... ... or doesn't vietnam and korea count?
but even after you lose this one, hollywood will make a nice flick called "bagdad" where bruce willis kills everyone in a turban.
Don't be patronising; I know what the crusades were. Crusade also means "A vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse" (ref. You can't seriously believe that that single statement from bush in 2001 proves that this is a christian war against muslims. Muslims in the US *still* have far greater freedoms than muslims in the middle-east! Bush has said over and over and over again that this is not a war against islam.
I guess yout think the Buddhists in Thailand are waging a holy war against innocent muslims too?
We've already had "witches", "heretics", "pagans", and "commies
You forgot infidels.
With enough warning, the US forces will be able to concentrate troops in a location to defeat the enemy. How? Military flash mobs -- a message goes out to small units to meet at a certain GPS coordinate at a certain time. In the case of needing heavy armor, the lead time would have to be even longer due to the limited numbers of Abrams available. But in the short term, the gap can be filled with ground-attack craft such as rotary-wing aircraft and A-10 Thunderbolt II's.
The idea is to distribute decision making, such as what ocurred in Afghanistan, and to Keep It Simple, by using robust technologies such as email and web browsers.
The big problem that the troops encountered in Iraq was outrunning the capabilities of the microwave-based communications systems. They even outran line-of-sight communications.
One solution to that would be to plant "trees" in the desert. The idea would be to air-drop large numbers of communications relays that would have a spike on the bottom. When it hits the ground, the spike keeps it upright, and the batteries run it for a couple of days. The "trees" form a resiliant packet-driven communications mesh much like the internet.
Chip H.
more details here
So, if a terrorist targets a skyscraper, and takes out a few hundred CIA employees along with a few thousand "collateral damaged" civilians, then how is that different from carpet bombing urban areas?
Perhaps we wouldn't have been in that kind of trouble if we hadn't been in Baghdad in the first place.
Yup, the usual. Just say "we shouldn't have gone to war" and then *poof*, you never did. All of the consequences are magically erased and everything is back to 'normal'.
Unfortunately, for anyone who lives in reality, whether you like it or lump it (which is irrelevant), the US *is* in Iraq and there is no easy way to leave without making things enormously worse.
But no, most pacifists don't have any answers for that, just their own comfortable little fantasy and tons of empty criticism. There is no such thing is backwards error recovery in human affairs, only forward recovery.
But then, most pacifists don't care if Iraq were to erupt into a civil war that killed millions of people and left Iranian-backed nuclear terrorists in control; they have their panties in a twist over the western troops and Iraqi babies being killed in ones and twos. 'Pacifists' are the most blood-thirsty people I know.
People need to get some perspective that Islamic terrorism is a problem that is not going to go away on its own; it is a struggle that is going to last for decades and its only two outcomes are the transformation of the Middle East into first-world democracies, or the destruction of civilization. 'Containment' is not a feasible idea.
Many people may think that the easy way out for the US is to simply install a new dictator and be done with it. Its funny how in the very next breath these exact same people will criticize that this idea has never worked very well in the past and has produced many of the problems we have today.
Maybe you criticize that Iraq was the wrong target to begin the struggle with, but, in fact, it is a country in a very strategic location and, gosh darnit, the terrorists that weren't there before are certainly there NOW. If Bush actually had the stones to deal with them instead of letting Iraq fall to shit, we would be well on our way. It is pointless to criticize Bush for invading Iraq since it is already done; instead, criticize him for not putting enough effort into securing it.
Of course, maybe the Islamic-terrorist 'insurgents' deserve some smidgeon of blame for trying to ruin the only chance their civilization has at a future, but maybe blaming any terrorists for their actions is just crazy talk and we need to get back to bashing Americans like always.
So you claim there's no causation between the behaviour of occupying troups and the amount of resistance they will encounter? There's quite some historical evidence for that. Oh, here's a recent link. The story is inspired by the request of the American troops for the British to take care of some territory for them while they attack Faluja. There's a whole lot of resistance in Britain for covering for 'incompetent assholes whose only sense of decency is to kick in doors instead of blowing them up'. Yes, this is a journalist describing the American troops (no link for this, local newspaper).
Could you give us some sources? I did a little search and came up with completely different ratios.
// This is not a sig.
To this day, they still avoid the words "Guerilla War" since that was associated with 'nam. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush will chide anybody using it.
Yet, in 'nam, the enemies were a small group of citizens that had backing from nearby nations. They hid amongst the locals and were able to operate freely.
But nah, that does not apply to Iraq.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
IraqBodyCount.net is a site with an agenda. I don't trust their numbers. Especially since there is little way to tell dead civilians from dead "insurgents".
p leted_uranium.shtml
> http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/DU/faq_de
Because of a law passed in the 1990's.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Is there anyone who honestly believes that our military and government wouldn't prefer to line up all of the combatants in a field where we could battle it out? Unfortunately, we don't get to choose the playing field. If we're going to engage guerilla targets, that means going where the guerillas are. Definitely not a preferred state of being, given our strengths and weaknesses.
So, if a terrorist targets a skyscraper, and takes out a few hundred CIA employees along with a few thousand "collateral damaged" civilians, then how is that different from carpet bombing urban areas?
I may be wrong, but I don't think the US has carpet bombed any urban areas since WWII.
That point aside, the difference is in the goals. If the goal is to kill civilians in order to scare them, that is terrorism. If the goal is to take out military targets, that is not terrorism. If you have examples of the US targeting civillians to create fear, then by all means, tell me about them. I am no fan of the current US policy, and I would like to be better informed.
Updated news, tommorow's headlines:
Last night the iraqies invaded the united states, some terrorists pockets seem to be resisting the invaders.
Obviously they are resisting the abolishment of their corrupt government, the abuse of the poor by the wealthy. The beatings by police in the streets. Forced reeducation, which teaches an altered more patriotic version of history in order to garner support for their corrupt government rather than what actually happened. The masses dying of starvation on the streets.
Lets face it folks, these are terrorists. There is no possible way they could be the teaming masses united against a common foreign invader. There is no way they could really be those who are yearning to breathe free.
No matter how corrupt your nation allegedly is (remember, the only ones contesting the 90+% popularity ratings of Saddam are the guys supporting the war who CLAIM with NO EVIDENCE those numbers are forced, or that any of those alleged atrosities are actually happening). There ARE those who will stand together and fight a foreign enemy who has invaded their soil. If Iraq had a dictator, as far as iraq was concerned, that was there problem and a far less severe one than being conquered by the US.
Ok, that's a good idea, but it won't remove the need for convoy escorts. Nor will it stop IED's or small arms fire from disabling the truck. Truck convoy without escorts won't survive any better with additional armor than without it. If you add armor so that the vehicle can take hits from heavy infantry weapons without being destroyed, the vehicle becomes too heavy and expensive to be useful.
Good armor protection = lots of weight
I wonder here if there really a technology failure to deliver information to the front-line troops or a matter of trust? A more likely explanation to me is that information was withheld. The bridge apparently was so vital that it was worth seizing with a relatively small force. But maybe HQ was afraid that the ground forces wouldn't move in aggressively enough if they knew what the Iraqi army had nearby.
Which arab/muslim cultures? Is muslim culture the same as arab culture? Are the arab cultures in Syria, Iraq, Iran, egypt, etheopia, pakistan, lebanon etc are all the same? Are all arabs alike no matter where they are in the world. Are all muslims alike no matter where they are in the world?
The fact that you are able to make sweeping judgements about a race despite their cultural differences makes you a racist.
What if I wrote a book called "the negro mind" and lumped together people from africa, carribian, the US and europe and pretended that they all think and act the same because they are all black. Would that be racist? You bet yous ass it would.
evil is as evil does
"Anyway, trying to tie it to Saddam makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHAT SO EVER"
Bingo!. While ranting against what you thought I was saying you accidentally hit on exactly what I was saying.
BTW giving Putin the green light slide the soviet union backwards to totalitarionaism will be noted as the worst mistake of G.W. Did you know Bush calls Putin "pootie poot"? Google for it.
evil is as evil does
He said crusades a couple fo times. He has also said that he believes God chose him to be the president and that god speaks through him.
evil is as evil does
and, to continue the line of reasoning, another question follows (spurred from the yellow ribbon "support our troops stickers"): What can we, as civilians, actually do to "support our troops"?
Vote Kerry.
Unlike the chicken hawks whose knowledge of war comes from Tom Clancy novels, Kerry's seen the real thing -- and doesn't have a hankering to prove himself to his daddy by sacrificing American soldiers in unwinnable, unnecessary wars.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
If a savage clubs another savage, they are both involved. If one savage throws a "supper clubber 9000" with a club bash diameter of 100 meters, and it kills the other savage, 6 children, 3 farmers, and a a womens sewing group, is this better then the savage just clubbing the other savage? you still killed the other savage, but now you have pissed off a few familys.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
"filled (with) many thugs and such"
That's one of the things in dispute.
It is even geting better, American Contractors are not using Americans in case they die I suppose but it is perfectly alright to send Chilean mercenaries instead, probably the ones they trained under Pinochet's bloody regime.
He's DEAD!
Pretending he exists serves a purpose for U.S. foreign and military policies - and for the Iraqi resistance. Disinformation is useful to bothe sides here. You believe he is alive, based on what evidence? Derived from what sources? Whith what motivation for honesty?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Dont let the right wing door hit you on the ass as you leave.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Sure, but the antimosity between the christians/pagans and arabs(and jews*) is even longerstanding...
Yeah, it means you're a bigot and a fool- not irrelevent.
General rule of thumb: When your arguement is the exposition of bigotry against a race/creed/religion, try not to be so transparent about your personal bigotry.
I think this is the 'pot v kettle' arguement...
Though basic knowledge of history sometimes would be just as usefull!
* more releveant to killjoe I would imagine...
On the other hand, how intelligent your platform is, aerial bombardment has always been an outright murder because of the inherent low accuracy. Whatever you do, from 15000ft at 400 knots, you can't judge who is innocent and who is not.
I may be wrong, but I don't think the US has carpet bombed any urban areas since WWII.
The US carpet bombed North Vietnam, including Hanoi, for the best part of 2 years during the Vietnam war.
And don't forget, carpet bombing was *the* major component of the US campaign against the Taliban.
If the goal is to kill civilians in order to scare them, that is terrorism
The most significant criticism against the "Shock and Awe" concept is the high tendency for civilians and civilian structures to become targets in the effort to break the enemy's will. So was that terrorism?
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
In ww1 & ww2 both sides were prepared for war, so civilians and military were not mixed as they are today.I'm pretty sure the residents of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, London and Stalingrad will agree with you.
Hmmm... Dresden? Hamburg? Berlin? London during the Blitz?
Last week, about moving 600 Scottish Soldiers closer to Baghdat, Tony Blair (probably historically an unfortunate remark) stated that "they will be back home before Christmas". Oh right, when did I last hear this?
Iraq War is going on after almost 1.5 years. I would call this war "not a short one"...
While in the US Army in (then) West Germany, I was rather humbled by how often the West Germans, British and even the Dutch would beat us during joint field exercises. They tended I think to understand that technology was neat, but no magic bullet. Too much American equipment is sold by vendors that way overstate capabilities. So thermal imaging gear that works pretty well during a clear still night in the Arizona desert is absolutely useless during typically drizzly European weather. Substitute sand/dust/whatever for "drizzly" and you get the idea.
"Can you say that the world is better with Saddam in power?" "Don't you see the need to support our troops in this time of crisis??"
Don't you love how every time someone questions the Bush/Cheney decision to drag us into this unnecessary war, the right-wingers imply that critisizing the Administration is 'helping the enemy and hurting our troops.'
This is just an obvious attempt to prevent anyone from discussing this catostrophic decision during the election. Must be wonderful to have so many people willing to ignore the facts and pretend this was a good idea in the name of 'patriotism' and 'supporting our troops'.
Personally, I believe it is our duty as Patriots to question the Administration, and I feel I support the troops best by getting them home while they are still alive.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Actually, yes, I do value winning over the circa 1500 AD definition of "honour". =)
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Clearly you have absolutely no concept of the reality that exists in Iraq today. People for the first time have new buildings for schools, running water, and even cell phones. American soldiers and contractors are pouring money into that country and developing the country faster than you can believe. There has been serious political spin put on reality (as is to be expected during an election year), but many on slashdot continually quote and reference a sensational news media, who choose to focus on blood and gore because that is what gets attention. The average Iraqi is not joining the insurgency in Iraq and finally something has been done to show it.
Read a review about a documentary, Voices of America that shows real Iraqis talking about their issues. The common thread that is expressed (watch the film yourself before you do not believe me) is that Iraq is happy that Americans liberated them from Saddaam's mercilous rule and they want America to stay in their country until they are secure.
How can you refute this? I was in Iraq and saw the development and Iraqi sentiment first hand. What are you talking about when you say:
A U.S.-led force invaded their country, occupied it, killed many of their buddies and family, broke normality and turned their reality into chaos. It doesn't matter whether the resitance has some kind of "right" to fight back or not, or if they were or are "pro-Saddam" or "pro-dictatorship" or muslim or christians or agnostics or whatever.
This is NOT the case what so ever... You need to check your sources of information. The "normality" that existed was a life of fear. I am not saying that I have no political bias, but I was their first hand and traveled extensively through the country. I am starting to feel that some people ignorantly embrace whatever the media tells them.
Which arab/muslim cultures?
Saudi Arabian Wahhabis are the first that come to mind. Palestinians the second, and let's not forget the Taliban- though Afgahnistan is technically Asian.
That's enough to get you started. Are all the countries you listed the same? No. Are the source of the lashing-out losers I term " failed Arab Muslim" sufficiently Arab & Muslim to justify the label? I think so.
Are all Arab-Muslims terrorists? No. Are All terrorists Muslim & usually arab? With one exception for Timothy Mcviegh, yes.
Generalizations exist because they have some basis in reality. The generalization I made is likewise based in reality.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
You are right. We cannot cut and run. That bastard Bush has put the American people in a terrible situation. Continue to fight an unjust war in a country that doesn't want us there, or leave a huge mess behind and make the whole region worse off and future terrorists multiplying like bacteria in a Petrie Dish.
This is a no-win situation for the US. Can you believe that half the country is planning to vote for the fool who put us there?
God help the US.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Dear coward. I'm sorry, but you seem to be suggesting that the trouble the US occupation is in at this moment is caused by a desire of the Sunnite population to get Saddam back in power. That just doesn't swing, or is this liberation argument of your government a lie now as well?
Once again there is a book written about the arab mind whose author is a jew. If you find that this has no relevance whatsoever then you are simply being blind.
evil is as evil does
:-) After spending billions on it, Patriot missile system still shoots down friendly aircraft and what was your point?
As far as I can see, the South has more reasons to hate the occupants than the north.
You still haven't answered my question. DO all arabs think alike no matter what country they live in? Do all muslims think alike no matter what country theylive in?
This is a book that purports to know "the arab mind". This implies that there is only one arab mind and that's it's knowable. the premise of the book itself is racist.
evil is as evil does
and you're basing this on what?
-- My Sig is a P228.
As far as armoring vehicles is concerned, a company by the name of Armor Holdings (symbol AH) has scored major contract awards to up-armor thousands of Humvees to ward off the effects of IEDs in-theater. DHB likewise has been selling ballistic blankets as fast as they can ship them out the door -- these blankets can be cut to fit the contours of a vehicle, and are used to reduce or eliminate flying shrapnel in the event that your vehicle rides over a mine or something like it.
To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
...and 300 slashdot posters read that article and only see how badly we've "bungled" the war.
And the BUSH ADMINISTRATION is divorced from reality?
Why do you guys even bother to read the articles, if all really want is validation that "Republicans are stupid"?
-Styopa
Completely off-topic but why does Baen always publish the worst SF it can find?
Which brings us to the question, would Bush have decided on this elective war if he knew it would result in those sorts of casualties? We already know he thought there would be zero casualties, and we know that, given the current casualty level, he wouldn't do anything different.
I don't think he could have sold the war to the American people if the American people knew in advance there would be a casualty rate in the tens of thousands. The very fact that so many people have turned against him because of a casualty rate of just over a thousand proves this.
So bottom line, the one positive thing about high casualty rates is that it might deter a democratic nation from engaging in an elective war. We might have done a bit more due diligence and seen that the claims to support the war were weak at best, if not completely false.
Secondarily, if the stakes were that high, we might have had a better plan in place for "winning the peace". "Hope for the Best" is not a plan. You plan for the worst. Unfortunately, planning for the worst is considered pessimistic thinking by the Bush administration, and we can't have pessimistic thinking undermining our efforts.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
You don't really get it to you ? How could awarding contracts now provide armour at the beginning of this year ? Think about it. The contracts have been awarded, how long before the vests / armour etc reach the front line troops ? These contracts should have been awarded a year or more ago so that the troops had the protection you're talking about.
Does anyone remember the Highway to Hell in Kuwait?
Now that we invaded a country and we have made their lives FAR worse than it was under sadaam, they are switching to Al Qaida. A lot of damage has been done.
FAR worse? WTF are you babbling about you ignorant piece of shit?
They are FREE in case you hadn't noticed dumbass. They can go out and buy satellite dishes and not have to worry about hiding them. They can use the internet, they can run their own blogs, they can even call Saddam Hussein a mother fucker rather than just thinking it to themselves. They have far more income now than they did under Sadaam (except those who are too fucking lazy or stupid to find something to do except bitch about how good they had it when Sadaam was in power, those fools are still dirt poor and always will be since everything that happens in their little world is always someone else's fault and that someone else is usually a Jew to boot.) How the fuck is that worse off?
You sound like one of those goddamned liberal dipshits who go on and on about how Foxnews is so biased yet you want to believe all the other news outlets who don't report anything but the bad shit coming out of Iraq since it supports your opinion that we shouldn't have invaded in the first place.
Too bad your dumb ass doesn't live in a dictatorship. Might cure your ignorance although that isn't guaranteed. Look at the Iraqis. Some of them are stupid enough to think they had it better under Sadaam, but that's because they were his bully boys keeping the rest of the population in line. Now that the Lion of Bagdad isn't so high-and-fucking-mighty anymore all his former bullies have found out that they are just uneducated, ignorant, non-employable, scumbag thugs with no future since all that they ever knew how to do was drink alcohol, steal from people, beat the shit out of people and intimidate people for Sadaam in exchange for chump change.
All the people that Sadaam's bullies oppressed know how much better their lives are. They have hope. They have opportunity. They have the freedom to choose. They can make something of themselves.
All Sadaam's bullies have no hope since the only thing they ever had going for them sits locked up in a cage awaiting trial for his crimes.
If this article is correct the U.S. Bn. in the lead at the bridge had 25/30 tanks, 14 Bradleys and 1,000 troops. This seems a bit short on the Bradleys, unless there were a lot of engineers along for the ride. Was there anyone defending the bridge (I don't think the Iraqis destroyed one bridge during the invasion)? Also, the Iraqi attack (25/30 tanks, 70 APCs and 10,000 troops) would suggest only one brigade of armor- who were the rest of the troops and were they operating under centralized command, or were most of them in locally-led counterattacks. The failure of the Iraqis to deploy mines and explosives- never mind ambush teams- makes me wonder what was up. Dave
Did they ever managed to get the guy who ordered to fabricate an Anthrax scare?
Well, that's a good start, but your best bet is to trust noone and think for yourself.
For example, and on the obvious side of the coin, I won't trust anything Condoleeza Rice has to say when everything she's said about Iraq has turned out to be false.
With respect to the Dan Rather memos, it's quite possible that the memos are fake but the story is true. Sure, the messenger has been shot, and rightfully so. That doesn't mean much to me.
The reality (or our perception of it) is not what matters her. what does matter is what these people have been led to believe - thats what these people are going to act on. This attitude of "why do they call us [blank] when we are really doing [blank]" seams to be a problem in the US. remember that these people do not always have access to the best or true information (many American's are the same way), but everyone can only act on the information they have. and, if the information you have all points to "America (terrorists, invadors, etc.) is bad", then that is what you tend to believe.
I'm sure you hold some beliefs that are equally uneducated, as does any person.
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
here are some hard facts. from them it is obvious why the move to deeper tech.
take 100 new recruits, doesn't matter what army or nation as this is a human universal truth.
train them fully and send them into battle.
you have 100 men going "over the top"
90 of these men will roar and scream and fire off bullets, but they will NOT aim at the enemy and IF they hit an enemy soldier it will be purely by chance.
9 men will aim at and kill enemy soldiers, they will do it to prevent those enemy soldiers from shooting their friends, they will not enjoy it, and when hailed as heroes and awarded medals they will try to avoid the limelight.
The remaining 1 man will aim at and kill enemy soldiers, he does this because he enjoys it, he does it so well that he accounts for as many enemy as the other 9 men out of the original 100, he is a psychopath.
Ideally you'd want an army made out of the 1% "beserkers", but what would you do with them when there wasn't a war to send them to? you wouldn't want them back home....
The solution to the 90 men who make a lot of noise and consume a lot of ammo and turn them into killers of the enemy is simple.
Crew Fed Weapons.
Any weapon that takes more than one man to operate, eg NOT a rifle, but a heavy machine gun or tank etc, because what happens here is everyone operating the weapon jointly places the guilt for firing at human beings on to the other members of his team.
ergo, ___all___ weapons and ___ALL___ soldiers must feel that they are a part of a machine, just like the human beings shoving other human beings into the ovens 60 years ago.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Did anyone ever read "Superiority" by Arthur C. Clarke? It was included in "Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century". The plot is that the military commander of one side is trying to explain why his side lost despite ridiculously overwhelming technological superiority.
Obviously that's not what's going to happen to us, but I still think the short story is relevant...
[o]_O
Swords to plowshares = Peace.
Combustion engines to paperweights = Peace and Quiet.
^^^
SD rated this comment as flamebait. Then forges along with its conversation concerning the effectiveness of implements of mass murder.
I could talk for hours about the effectiveness of holocaust genocide techniques. By the rationale I see here that would be and "+2 informative" and "+1 insightful" -- whereas the guy saying "lets stop the murder machine" would be "-2 troll", or "-1 flamebait".
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." -- He wasn't talking about a peacemaker pistol.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Please read here. (Simply first one to come up on Google.)
I quote from the article "The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reports that since Saddam was ousted 270 sites of mass graves have been reported. These contain an unknown number of Iraqis, Iranian prisoners of war, Iraqi Kurds and Kuwaiti prisoners among the long list of those Saddam tortured and killed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair puts the remains in mass graves at 400,000 so far."
Questioning whether the Iraqi War was right, legal and whatnot is valid (and a good thing to do). Saying that Saddam did not kill thousands of people is like saying the Holocaust never happened...
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Yes, I know I'm only some 5 Karma Star Armchair General in front of a PC and it's easy to critize but still...
That's very true, but consider these two points:
1) It might be difficult and require lots of training to do something right, but it is usually easy to recognize something being horribly botched. 2) Nothing you're saying hasn't already been said by actual Generals and then ignored by the civilian command (at least until the Generals were proven right).
The enemies of Democracy are
Speaking of reality..."A new survey that Bush supporters choose to keep faith in their leader than face reality."
It's amazing, but is it surprising? Faith is the foundation of loyalty. As it happens, Bush Jr is supported most vociferously by fundamentalists and others of varying degrees of religious fidelity. Religion is the most commonly visible example of faith (others are sports, the stock market, and other forms of gambling), and loyalty to something unseen or even proven false is its hallmark.
It goes to show that blind faith doesn't lead to wise choices.
= 9J =
It was never intended to kill civilians.
Ah, the "not my intentions" dodge.
Sure, we don't target civilians. But we have a proven track record of killing civilians, based on rather shoddy intelligence.
The lack of intention to kill civilians doesn't amount for much. Take this real-world example:
Iraqi: "The bad terrorist is in that apartment building."
Pentagon: "Okay, thanks."
Pentagon bombs said building at 2AM when everyone is likely to be sleeping.
Then it turns out there were four other families living there. (Along with the terrorist, and his family, including young children.) Result: One dead terrorists, 20 dead civilians.
Pentagon: "We do not deliberately target civilans."
Is the Pentagon lying? Technically, no. The civilians were never the target. But there is a very high tolerance for collateral damage. Perhaps far more than you realize.
Yeah, I agree.. War should be difficult for ENEMY. Not for us.
First off, I never said the soldiers in Black Hawk Down sprayed Mogadishu with bullets. Second, whether they did spray bullets all over Mogadishu really depends on your definition of "spray". Was it constant machine gun fire? No. Was it one bullet here, one bullet there, only shooting at those people that had guns? Absolutely not. And despite your implication, I did read the book, thank you very much.
Is this really true? If events like this really happen with any frequency in Iraq, then that is really sad.
The problem is - how to get factual information out of Iraq? I trust Al Jezeera as much as I trust Fox News, and the big networks don't seem to be running these sorts of stories.
And don't forget, carpet bombing was *the* major component of the US campaign against the Taliban.
It is not true on both counts. Each time there were military targets. You imply the targets were civilian. It was "collateral damage" whowever high civilian casualties were. Please have facts handy if you want to prove me wrong.
This is a great point. The last US president i can remember that actually 'won' guerrilla situations was reagan. And he did it through butchering and terrorizing the population supporting (otherwise LEGITIMATE) guerrilla movements in Salvador, Guatemala and elsewere in central and central america.
Mind you i think Reagan and the US military, and people that supported this are nothing but stupid murdering, blood thirsty thugs (beheading qualifies as innocent childplay when compared to what the US special forces did in the 80's in central america), but if we are talking about war strategy, this is an example of how do you win a guerrilla situation.
NO SIG
The US couldn't stay the course.
I assume you are aware that 'Nam was the longest overseas conflict we've ever been in involved in (just around a decade).
Exactly how long should we have "stayed the course?"
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
DO all arabs think alike no matter what country they live in? Do all muslims think alike no matter what country theylive in?
....
...
Bah. Of course not. That's a ridiculous question. But there's enough similarities to allow us to make generalizations.
This implies that there is only one arab mind and that's it's knowable. the premise of the book itself is racist.
Look, maybe you haven't been paying attention, but different cultures are, in fact, DIFFERENT. No one gives a shit when we say asians are hardworkers, and the work ethic is rather dominant in most asian countries. It's a common joke that the Irish are heavy drinkers, Brits are reserved, etc, etc. Cultures have definate, identifiable traits that seperate them from others. Is that really such a hard concept to grasp? No? Then why do you toss around the term 'racist' when we start saying bad stuff about one culture, one that happens to involve many countries in the middle east?
For a small glimpse, with details, into the 'Arab mind', check out this: Why Arabs Lose wars. It should have enough frontline observations to get even a multiculturilist like you doubting your usual lines.
I'll even give you a few opening paragraphs:
False starts
Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it has often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking, and mythology. Thus, the U.S. Army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that that country would be permanently disadvantaged in technology. Hitler dismissed the United States as a mongrel society and consequently underestimated the impact of America's entry into the war. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated our own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees. Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.
As these examples suggest, when culture is considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces, it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the opposite: to view the potential enemy through the prism of one's own cultural norms.
Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an individual's race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a mockery of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to individuals -- as the military histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires illustrate. In both cases it was training, discipline, esprit, and élan which made the difference, not the individual soldiers' origin. The highly disciplined and effective Roman legions, for example, recruited from throughout the Roman Empire, and the elite Ottoman Janissaries (slave soldiers) were Christians forcibly recruited as boys from the Balkans.
These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess the role of cultural factors in warfare...
Reading this article should wash any thoughts of cultural equivalency out of your head- you can hem and haw all day about quality of life, consumerism, etc when comparing cultures, but you can't on war. One side wins.... and one side dies. Demonstratable superiority.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
A little story....
You get in the head by rock. You have a good idea who did it, but it hurts like hell so you run home home with tears in your eyes and blood on your forehead.
Your older brother is home. You tell him the story of how you got hit by rock while he gently takes care of your wound. Needless to say your big brother is quite angry that someone threw a rock and hit you in the head.
You tell him it's a group of boys down the road. They're always causing trouble. So your big brother starts going down the road. You get a big grin on your face, knowing your brother will take care of everything.
Well, the group of boys see your brother heading down the road and know the gig is up. They start running away, but your big brother catches a few a them and gives them a good beating. The one who hit you with the rock, the ring leader, got away.
But that never stopped your big brother before! Your brother starts to go in search of the others when he see's another boy off on the side of the road. You know him. He caused some problems a long time ago, but everyone on the block makes sure he behaves now.
Your brother starts going towards the other boy. You tell your brother that the boy didn't throw the rock at you and he doesn't even hang around with the other boys. You're brother tells you he thinks that boy has a rock and he's just waiting for the right time to through it at you. You look at the boy. He has a cast on one arm and one leg, and barely looks like he can stand on his own. You tell your brother that you don't think he could pick up a rock let alone through one. You're brother tells you that he's absolutely sure that not only does he have a rock, he has a whole bunch of rocks. Not only that, but he gives rocks to the boys that threw the rock at your head!
You think back to rock that hit your head and remember how much it hurt. You look at your brother, who tells you that he just wants to protect you. He wants you to be safe, and not have to worry about the boys throwing rocks at you anymore. You smile at your big brother.
As your brother approaches the boy, the other guys on the block who make sure the boy doesn't cause trouble come out and talk to your brother. It seems a lot of them don't like what your brother is about to do. Your brother says he's just trying to protect you, and that he knows the boy is up to no good.
After a few minutes of talking, your brother tells them that he doesn't care what they say. Your brother is bigger than all of them and, with a swift movement of his arm he pushes them all out of the way. You watch with warm feelings as your big protective brother lays a good beating on the boy.
After couple of punches, the boy is down. Your brother starts searching the boy, and asking questions. Your brother turns back to you and tells you that the boy didn't have any rocks, and he didn't even like the boys that threw the rock at you. Then your brother bends over, reaches into the boys pocket and takes his money....
Do you like your big brother anymore?
Oh, the failure here wasn't technology. The failure began with big brother.
~X~
~X~
Hell, 1000 years after the Fall of the Western Empire, Greeks in Byzantium still called themselves "Romans".
That's because they were Romans, in the same sense that anyone in the empire during the reign of, say, Marcus Aurelius, was a Roman (as distinct from a resident of the city proper).
The Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire may have spoken Greek, but it was still the same uninterrupted political & social entity. The Roman empire did not fall until the mid-15th century.
Oddly enough, Israel doesn't figure in this fiasco at all, so your last comment is as inaccurate and irrelevant as your first comment.
If you believe that then you'll believe anything."...we needed approximately 3 times as many troops to secure the country."
This apparent discrepancy is interesting since both sides are right.
The U.S. did need 3 times as many troops for one thing, to suppress the looting and lawless chaos immediately following the invasion. In that Shinseki was correct. Obviously they also needed more MP's as they started mass round up of mostly innocent Iraqi's (though of course the better approach would have been to not arrest anyone you didn't know to be dangerous since it helped fuel the insurgency when Americans were breaking down doors everynight and rounding up people for no particularly good reason most of the time).
But if you look at the invasion itself and the current insurgency its questionable if more troops would have helped or will helped.
For the invasion it would have dramatically delayed the war, increased its cost, placed even more stress on supply lines and wouldn't have made the invasion any more successful. You can argue that delaying the war might have been a good thing, maybe cooler heads would have prevailed and it wouldn't have happened, but the Bush administration was in an extreme rush, they had the country whipped in to a frenzy and were still riding 9/11 so they had to do it fast. Thats how they do most things that are ultimately bad... Iraq, the Patriot Act, Medicare Reform and now the National Intelligence reform Act. They rush them through before any opposition can build or the American people can come to their senses.
As for the insurgency it is again very dubious to say putting more troops on the ground would improve the situation. More troops mean more targets for insurgents and especially more supply convoys to shoot up. It also increases the footprint and the feel of occupation which is the thing that fuels insurgency. Having a couple hundred thousand teenage Americans with raging hormones and frequent poor judgement isn't going to make the people in the occupied country happier. If you don't have the intelligence to find and engage the insurgents having more troops is of dubious value. They would end up acting as police, would be bad at since they don't speak the language or understand the culture, and mostly they would just be more targets to shoot at.
That said, its obvious the U.S. Army and Marines are stretched thin, especially if they are going to have to fight a series of ugly urban battles in Fallujah, Sadr City and elsewhere. It is a sign of "stretched thin" that Britain's Black Watch is being sent into the Sunni triangle to free up U.S. troops for a major battle, or if you are a cynic to get some British troops killed so it doesn't look like a coalition where only Americans and Iraqis are dieing.
That stretched thin look and collapsing coalition is going to get worse when "Don't Forget Poland" and Italy pull out right after the elections. Apparently Fiji did contribute a hundred or so troops to defend the UN election effort which makes up for it...sic.
It was interesting to watch the Commons debate on the Blackwatch deployment. In the UK there are plenty of smart politicians that state the obvious that you don't hear at all in the U.S. media. America's propensity for dropping precision guided bombs to fight an urban insurgency is ultimately self defeating. Occasionally they might hit a real target but a fair percentage of the time they are killing women and children in densely populated urban areas. Everytime that happens you create gruesome footage of dead civilians that doesn't air in the U.S. for the most part but is all over the Arab networks and is pouring gasoline on the insurgency. Even the DOD admits it no with estimates of the number of insurgents doubling and charges of massive funding for it from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran.
The British are in an obviously less challenge zone in Iraq but from what I've seen of their leadership and rules of engagement I'm betting their low key approach is far more likely to succeed than the massively heavy
@de_machina
"Look, maybe you haven't been paying attention, but different cultures are, in fact, DIFFERENT."
But he is not talking about cultures, he is talking about race. The arab mind is not about the culture of a particular nation it's about the thinking process of an entire race no matter what country they live in or what culture they experience. That's racism in a nutshell. The idea that all arabs think alike because of their race.
The conclusion that he reasches (which is that the arabs are an insect like unthinking race) is doubly racist.
evil is as evil does
"Also, you must understand that while people are protesting the war, that gives the people we are fighting hope to stick it out longer. The longer they stick out, the more of my buddies they blow holes into."
What is your evidence that anti-war protestors cause the insurgents to continue fighting? Anyone who picks up a weapon against the most powerful military in the world has to be pretty motivated already. And they can't realistically expect to live. So why would a few protestors in a country far away matter? Especially when he (she) has seen their country invaded (liberated), innocents killed, their buddies killed, people tortured, their culture disrespected, the utilities destroyed, unemployment has skyrocketed, etc. And this has been done by the soldiers who came to "liberate" their country.
I hate to say it, but the things likely most responsible for the insurgents resolve are the actions of the soldiers. Anti-war protestors are merely window dressing.
"If America was really pro-war, the troops would get more equipment, and our enemy's moral would break sooner."
And how would more equipment help? It wouldn't. More troops would. Because the war isn't popular (for various reasons) they aren't going to come. More troops wouldn't break the enemy morale. Hell, it would probably increase it considering their actions to date....
"I am not saying that you should not be able to talk against the war, but the sad truth is when an insurgent reads on the internet that half of America hates the war and political parties want to just "shut up and leave", well that gives him the hope to shoot another few people in camouflage, and abduct a few more reporters because if it lasts long enough, America might just "shut up and leave" just like Vietnam."
Look, an insurgent reading about protests in the US is going to be motivated by them as as much as the protests bother President Bush. They won't/don't. They have already decided their course of action. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.
Finally, America will just "up and leave". It is only a matter of time, NO politician from EITHER party has stated otherwise. If the new government wants us to leave, we will. The only debate is when and how and EVERYONE who matters wants it to be ASAP and total.
Since the start of the war (when saddam left power) there have been devestating bombings all over the world. remember Bali, Spain, and the hotel bombing in kenya.
Bali? Bali? That happened before the Iraq war.
Peace Brigades International
I also recommend that you spend some time with On War by Carl von Clausewitz. Despite the fact that this work is approaching 200 years old it remains one of the definitive works on the subject.
Now, when we are already at war, it's too late to whine and whimper. You may not agree with us being there, or think we should be there but for different reasons than we are. None of that matters now. What matters is that we are there and at war. It's time to deal with reality and get the job done that we went over there to do. It's time to put this partisan whining aside and finish what has been started. We can deal with "should have" and "would have" after our service men and women are no longer at risk.
As Kosh put it in Babylon 5, "When the avalanche has started it is too late for the pebbles to vote".
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
I'd like to note that in a news-program, it was noted that norwegian soldiers (my homecountry) in afghanistan not even carries their rifles in a "ready-to-shoot"-state. Rather, the carry their weapons on their back when talking to and\or making contact to civilians.
It was stated that this was due to a difference in mentality, which were meant to not frighten civilians, and make "normal contact" easier. Thus, increasing the security for the norwegian troops.
Think about it: Would you make contact to a foregin soldier with a big gun ready to shoot at you in the blink of an eye?
"If America was really pro-war, the troops would get more equipment, and our enemy's moral would break sooner."
Thats ridiculous. The American military and troops are getting staggering sums of money and the best gold plated equipment money can buy. The U.S. spends more on its military than the rest of the world put together. The U.S. was anti war from the end of Vietnam until Reagan. Reagan started returning the U.S. to pro war and pro military, and now since 9/11, Bush/Cheney and preemptive agressive warfare it is obviously very pro war at least in the halls of power and with everyone who watches Fox News.
When America was antiwar in the late 60's and 70's it was because they saw Vietnam and what kind of a complete screw up it was. If you don't recall the U.S. was fighting a war there that it had no plan to win and where the Pentagon was perpetually lieing to everyone (reference Gulf of Tonkin, Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers). In that respect it is very similar to Iraq. If American citizens hadn't turned against the war it would have gone on forever, killed millions and cost trillions. You would have never broke the enemy's moral in Vietnam, primarily because the U.S. was propping up a string of corrupt, ruthless dictators that were as bad or worse than the communists so they never had popular support.
Here is the rub. You seem to be arguing that American's have to back any war no matter how wrong or how big a mistake. American's need to back wars where America is threatened and fight them to win. When America's government loses its marbles and launches wars that aren't protecting America(and may actually be making it less safe), are costing American tax payers billions and getting America's sons and daughters killed it is totally American and patriotic to oppose it to the hilt. You see governments and politicians aren't infallible as much as George Bush thinks he is thanks to his divine guidance. They are fallible and they do make mistakes, often really bad ones.
So can you admit some wars are wrong and mistakes?
In particular once they settle in to insurgencies which have a critical mass of support from the local population they are unlikely to ever end and you aren't going to break the enemy's morale. When people are fighting for their country against an invading occupation army and nationalism has kicked in you are unlikely to break them (reference France in Algeria, the U.S.S.R in Afghanistan, Russia in Chechnya and the U.S. in Vietnam). Once the occupying force kills, arrests and tortures enough innocents and humiliated enough people with roadblocks and by breaking down their doors in the middle of the night the population will hate you in perituity and they will support the insurgency till the bitter end.
If you want to fault anyone for not supplying the troops, blame the White House, Pentagon and its contractor minions over multiple administrations. You need look no further than the article in this submission, 30 million lines of software. That is going to cost a fortune to develop, it will probably never be debugged to a usable state, much of it will fail in the chaos of battle outlined in this article. It will work great at headquarters, for the Air Force and the Navy, but putting all these computers and networks on the backs of the Army and Marines, in the mud in combat, is going to be a disaster as was outlined in this article.
For example, there is a level of insanity in thinking you are going to use line of site microwave to communicate to ground forces in combat. You would have figured they would have at least burned a few billion on satellite links.
The Pentagon wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on misguided, failed, overruning, canceled projects that end up mostly being pork for big defense contractors (reference the Boeing tanker deal for an example of corruption too), and jobs programs for programmers writing millions of lines of code that may or may not ever work.
If you peeled off a tiny fraction of the w
@de_machina
Thanks for sharing the "sad truth"! Crazy me, I would have thought terrorists get a lot more motivation from their insane religious leaders and fellow fanatics who are egging them on than they do from internet chat.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
No. The structure of the military failed. If you read the article (like I did), the technology worked just fine for the far more decentralized and non-hierarchical Special Forces units, as well as the big headquarters units (i.e., Division, Corps), but it failed or was not really implemented or tested well with manouver units. The article very clearly says that those at the higher command echelons were very pleased.
As usual, it is the ground pounder who still gets stuck in the fire. It's almost cruel - higher ups get a clear view of the battle, but no need is felt to even inquire whether the lower levels are getting the information they need. The Generals (Division commanders are generals) have their view of the battle, and all is peachy, while the Colonels, Captains, Lieutenants and Sergeants are kept in the dark.
You know the phrase... "keep me in the dark and feed me shit".
"Iran and Libya have been scared into stopping their nuclear programs"
Libya turned in a bunch of junk in order to get sanctions lifted. Its highly questionable if they had any WMD program at the time which had as its goal actually producing WMD's.
I'm not sure if Bush/Blair were just dumb and fell for it or they were smart and wanted the propaganda points they got by claiming they had some huge win when Libya turned in its WMD junk. I suspect it was the latter. It also had the added benefit of making it politically easy to lift sanctions on Libya and I assure you Bush/Cheney and Blair were overjoyed at doing that. Halliburton, in particular, really wants to be able to move in to Libya's oil fields without having to use foreign shells to bypass sanctions as they usually do. It also should allows increasing Libya's oil production which is desperately needed on world markets right now and is also probably high on the todo list of Bush/Cheney, oilmen that they are.
So next time you hear Bush/Cheney touting Libya's WMD program just remember it is propaganda. You aren't any safer from being nuked, gassed or infected in your cozy little American home because Qaddafi but some WMD junk to turn over to the U.S.
As someone said the massive threat America is leveling at Iran is probably causing them to accelerate their nuclear program not slow or stop it. Iran knows quite well if they have the bomb, and especially one on a missile that will reach Israel, the U.S. will be deterred from invading them. If they don't have the bomb its pretty obvious from recent experience in Iraq the U.S. might contrive an excuse to invade them at the drop of a hat. The most dangerous phase for Iran is the current one where they are rushing to develop a bomb, and are bringing a reactor online next year, with the high probability the U.S. or Israel will attack them next year to stop it and another major crisis will ensue (unless the European's negotiate a deal).
So you could argue that Iran just needs to abandon their program and all would be well. Well unfortunately its not because its been proven the U.S. may continue to level accusations of WMD development against a country it wants to invade and its impossible for a country to prove it doesn't have a secret WMD program. The difference between Iran and Libya in this regard is the neocons want to invade Iran to further protect Israel, and consolidate its control of the biggest oil fields, and don't much care about invading Libya. Iran knows the U.S. is building 14 permanent bases in Iraq that will permanently threaten Iran until the current government is toppled.
@de_machina
So, are you in fact, basing your entire position on the title of the book, or some die-hard multi-culturalists review of the book?
I haven't read the book, but i have come across what is probably a lot of similar material, some of which i have shared with you.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Not really, no. Even by conservative measures, you can calculate out the number of sorties and the most favorable percentage of civilian "collateral damage" and you'll find that there are a lot more tragic bombing events than the ones which become big news items. It's much the same as murders in America, the number of stories reported in the news is not representative of how many are actually happening.
They just can't report them all.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Perhaps if Putin were such a friend he would cut off Russian weapon sales to Iraq and the rest of the Arabic world. Do you think the asshats in Chechnya are using M-16's and M-248'? Nope. AK-47's and RPG-7's.
I'd rather see our men (you?) die for the DEFENSE of America, not a vendetta or misplaced war. Saddam, despite being a royal nutcase, was NOT A THREAT to us at all. He was an insecure little dictator who abused his citizens.
Should he have been stopped? Yes, but by the regional forces, not us.
What erks me though is that my local firestation has to have a bake sale to buy equipment, while we ship billions of dollars overseas to a country that increasingly hates us. I respect and support our troops, which is why I don't like seeing them die for a vague misplaced purpose.
______________
Huh?
With the current administration, I imagine that if the price was $80-90/bbl, they would sell it.
But likely the price would be, "your oil for $15/bbl or we'll just have to take it". But China would probably want to buy Siberia from Russia first.
Best Slashdot Co
How many civilians died in the Dresden raid in WWII compared to how many aviators were shot down in said raid? *THAT* would be a meaningful ratio.
The worst civilian:military ratios were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Plus, with Iraq now, there is no truth coming out. The US does not say how many casualties there are when they drop some hot lead on some target in Fallujah. Then, pan to some poor Iraq hospital, where "hundreds of wounded have poured in, and scores were killed". OK, the truth is in the middle.
We're being out-propaganda'd again. And even our own propaganda is starting to look silly.
"There are WMD." "We think there are WMD" "Well, we honestly thought there were WMD" "Saddam had to go!" "John Kerry will sell you to the Chinese!"
Fear leads to Anger. Anger leads to Hatred. Hatred leads to...a job at Halliburton?
The title shows what the author was thinking, in a very real sense it's a summary of the book. Read the book and see for yourself. It's simply a gross caricature of arabs as unthinking automatons who are incapable of rational thought.
Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a racist author.
evil is as evil does
I did read page five, thank you very much. Don't have to get all snooty about it.
While they fought well, was that not a fight they should not have had to have? I'm going to refrain from saying you should have read the article in more depth, but they basically said if the enemy had not been so inept they would have fared a lot worse. That ONE unit was effective, but what about air units that never touched them that should have been harrassing them the whole time? What about them being dug in more and tottally ready for the coming attack, to perhaps have the choice of where to engae them?
Also you are poo-pooing the idea of the networked miltary as too theoretical, but on the last page they gave a good exampile in afghanistan f how it actually worked rather well. So it's more a question of revising the command model, perhaps in ways that I originally outlined in my post.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That model was pointed out as working quite well in Afhanistan, where each node was kind of independant and just used information relayed to them to help decide what action to take - like looking for a convoy a pilot thought he had seen in the area.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The armour on an M1 can stop any sovietesk RPG you toss at it. And damn the cost - our boys deserve less?
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I believe you are terribly unfamiliar with the concept of information compaction which helps you express as many ideas as possible in a long sentence without the interruption of punctuation to break the train of thought of the reader and create the necessity to concoct and arbitrary split in the ideas transferred just to please pedantic ACs too cowardly to even use their own name to write snide comments which people then read and say "what made him so uptight?".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See, Democrats such as yourself sort of have these blinders on that fail to realize what the hell people are talking about and instead take every moment to attack Bush, even when we're discussion simple military strategy!! Did I say a single thing about why there were there or anything indeed about the whole situation?
I was originally going to vote libertarian in this election. But it is responses like yours from countless democrats that led me to believe that under no circumstances do I want a leader voted in by people so myopic and unable to have real conversations. I don't like a lot of what Bush has done, I do like some of what he's done, but damn it all if you can have any kind of real conversation about it. Why do you think the Republicans are climbing in the polls? Try looking in a mirror man, because you pretty much summed up the whole Democratic party ticket in your single post.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The people killed in Iraq TODAY are either victims of suicide bombers, people who choose to take up arms against the new regime, or (sometimes, and only sometimes) the neighbors of terrorists who haven't turned in the mass murderers who kill their fellow Iraqi's next door because they don't give a crap. WAAAAAhHHHH. Cry me a river.
But what could we expect from someone who claims: 1. that 1/3 of the mass graves are iranian dead
-Thank goodness we can discount the other 2/3rds of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS THAT HAVE BEEN FOUND.
2. That we have killed more in one year than saddam in 20.
-Nice math skills you fascist shill. 15K vs. a regime that killed 30-50k per year. Hmmm. 15K vs. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS.
You're a deluded but nonetheless incredibly lucky idiot who had the foresight to be born in a place that won't stuff you into a plastic shredder feet first for telling a joke, or gang rape your wife and children while you watch because you didn't say the right thing. What do you choose to do with this incredible gift? Lick the posthumous boots of the second last (and definitely worst) NATIONAL SOCIALIST regime on earth. (Syria is now the last). An idiot like you probably doesn't know that NATIONAL SOCIALISM == NAZI. You're a modern day nazi apologist, or as Lenin put it: a useful idiot.
...because we weren't in a serious shooting war with them, and if we were, we would have bombed them flat and built Disney Island in it's place.
If we had, people would still be bitching about that. But Kennedy chickened out, and we nearly got WWIII as a result in 1962.
1. the U.S. communications and survelliance technology didn't work as expected.
2. Allowing the U.S. troops to be surprised by:
- 5 to 10 to 1 advantage in troops.
- 70 to 14 APC's.
- 30 on 30 tanks. (the important figure here)
3. The Iraqi's got massacred at this engagement, and we lost almost no one.
Shouldn't the headline be: '*Some* technology failed', or better yet 'In spite of some failures, the technology was wildly successful'?
Because the troops serve to fulfill the foreign policy objectives of the state, and the state has decided to depose a dangerous regime, claiming they can stay home is:
a) a waste of money, since we hire them to fight at our behest.
b) really just a euphemism for "pull them out now", because we can't win. (Essay bonus: How is that 'support'?
c) really just a euphemism for "pull them out now", because we shouldn't win. (Essay bonus: Same as above)
d) someone who thinks war is always wrong when it suspiciously appears to be in the actual interests of the United States.
e) someone who thinks that war is always wrong because it never solved anything except independence, slavery, and the speedy end of the worst regimes of the 20th century.
Improved battlefield efficiency means you kill more of the enemy's soldiers, faster.
It also means, if you are the USA or another civilised nation, killing less non-combatants by accident. Ultimate battlefield efficiency would be the destruction of only the leadership and military command of an enemy country, with the general populace not even noticing anything had happened.
Conversly if you are Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Ossama Bin Laden or Yasser Arafat there's no such thing as a non-combatant, and very pinnacle of battlefield effciency is the H-bomb. VX nerve gas running a close second of course, because its easier to make.
Some people must be fought. The alternative is surrender followed by death. It therefore behoves us to figure out the most effective methods and to use them to secure victory.
If Americans can boast the ability to track the movement of any ant in Russia, why cannot they use technology to track movements of alqaeda cell and most importantly bin laden?
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
Astonishingly, the CIA had almost no human intelligence inside Iraq to tell them what was going on. Technology has its advantages, but they can't overcome human stupidity, bureacracy, and the remarkable human ability to see what we want and expect to see.
Do you honestly think that every Iraqi who attacks US soldiers is on Saddam Hussein's side?
Then why are the shiites who were oppressed under Saddam fighting America too? What about the Marsh Arabs, who Saddam Hussein brutally tried to wipe out? The US mentioned them as a group to be liberated by the war, but one or two attacks and the US started bombing and killing them in the same manner as Saddam Hussein.
Sheesh man, go watch some news programs that aren't in english. I saw people holding their dead children's bodies and saying how the US dropped bombs that ruined the houses nearby. What about that Arab woman on Al-Jazeera who was sobbing about her dead family? (A clip of that was in Fahrenheit 9/11) How about the street riot that resulted at a checkpoint when an American soldier unthinkingly threw a Quran to the ground when searching a woman's bag? Or what about when the US helicopter tore down a Shiite religious banner, the US government denied doing it on purpose, and someone showed footage of the American in the chopper leaning out the door and cutting it down? I saw demonstrations on TV when the US shut down newspapers that were too critical of the American forces in Iraq. Did anyone here hear about the Abu Ghraib abuses before the photos came out? Failing that, did anyone read the testimony of witnesses who saw Americans (soldiers and/or contractors) raping Iraqis in that same prison? Has anyone bothered to understand that Najaf is a holy city for shiites, and bombing it like that is akin to bombing Vatican city? Najaf aside, did anyone who isn't shiite pay attention to the fact that the US troops got into a firefight and called in airstrikes in the holy cemetary, or flattened the shrine to one of the 12 Imams? You didn't hear about these things? Shiites all over the world were livid, including the moderates and pro-American ones. Did anyone notice that the US cancelled democratic elections last year, over fears that Iraqis may vote for people who don't support the US occupation? Speaking of which, even Iraqi politicians are accusing the US of acting like Israel in engaging in "Collective punishment."
Do you know how badly the unemployment in Iraq has skyrocketed? This is because the US fired all Iraqis who had any tie to the Ba'ath party (most people couldn't get a promotion unless they joined). In WWII, the Allies didn't fire everyone with Nazi ties, or else all civil servants and teachers and business owners would be out of a job. Imagine how much longer the US Reconstruction period would have lasted if the Union fired every last Southern politician.
Did you hear that people in Iraq are calling us Yazid? What? You don't know who Yazid is? Then WHAT business do we have in Iraq?
Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups seem to have the policy of preventing any human contact with the enemy!
So does the U.S. Army. So does the British Army. Your point?
My point is, this divide is artificial, it is created, it is handed down from in-human sources to human beings to have to deal with in the field.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Many Muslims all over the world believe it's a war on Islam. Despite Bush repeatedly saying it is not, the Bush administration seemed eager to go to war with muslim-majority Iraq despite shaky evidence and not North Korea. The Administration said Iraq violated UN resolutions, but Israel violated even more and even has nuclear weapons. Bush said he "unconditionally" supports Ariel Sharon, making a lot of Muslims angry. Bush supported the existence of some Israeli settlements, which just rankled further and showed the US wasn't evenhanded on the issue. Bush appointed Daniel Pipes, a harsh islamophobe, to the US Institute of Peace, bypassing the senate when they refused to confirm the appointment. Bush quietly promoted General Jerry Boykin instead of reprimanding him, months after he made comments that Muslims don't pray to the real God. However, he immediately condemned the Malaysian PM's remark about how Jews have other countries fight their wars for their behalf. Those two events happened within 24 hours of each other, and Bush seemed incensed about one and dismissed the other. John Ashcroft was caught trashing Islam, years before he started spying on the American Muslim community and arresting thousands without charge after 9/11.
It's not just the Bush administration, Muslims seem to believe that ALL Americans think Muslims are terrorists. Franklin Graham called Islam "a wicked religion." Pat Robertson followed up with similiar comments. When Jerry Falwell called the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) a 'terrorist,' there was international outrage. The anti-American party in Pakistan swept the election days after, massively increasing its number of seats in Parliment, something never done before. Ann Coulter's remark "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" was something that people still believe, while Bush's "crusade" comment was dismissed by lots of people after the White House apologized for not realizing the connotation.
Don't flatter yourself about Afghanistan, people see Hamid Karzai as a US puppet. Every Afghan and Pakistani I've talked to agrees on that. However, to be fair, the US racked up a lot of good will by helping stop the genocide in Bosnia. Muslims were thankful to Clinton for that, despite their dislike of his other policies and actions. Bush's attempts of helping Sudan aren't going to help much if mosques in Iraq and Afghanistan were bombed. (Yes, some were)
Yeah, he kept Iraq free from extremists, he had secret police in the mosques, and he executed dissident imams and ayatollahs, and even some people who went to the mosque too frequently.
Yet, people still make the claim that Saddam Hussein had ties with religious extremist groups. Impossible, he trusted none of them. They were a threat to his dictatorship.
"You are either with us or with the terrorists." --George W. Bush
What great choices. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay torturers or suicide bombers. No wonder the rest of the world is distancing themselves from America.
Go read a survey of Iraqi citizens. Several newspapers and think-tanks have released them recently. Many Iraqis are upset at the unemployment and that they don't feel safe. They did say that at least there was no kidnapping or drugs during Saddam Hussein's time. Free speech and upcoming free elections is worthless if you live in constant fear of car and aerial bombings. The most common answer to "What is the biggest problem in Iraq today?" was "Security" and not rights issues.
Terrorism dropped in 2002 compared to 2001. Actually, South America had more terrorism than the Middle East. Terrorism went up in 2003 compared to 2002.
The US government really should define "terrorism" because they seem to go after Muslims with it, and maybe drug dealers, but not people who phone in threats to the local abortion clinic or commit hate crimes against the mosque.
Yes, Libya tried for over a decade to get their sanctions repealed, but the US kept refusing. When the Bush administration wanted signs of ANY success, they pounced on it when Libya offered it again, despite being turned down repeatedly for at least a decade. They even offered to hand over the airline bombers, but the US didn't seem to care before.
Well, it's happened on more than one occasion. How about the Bradley fighting vehicle that was blown up, a crowd of civilians surrounded it chanting and what not, and then the Apache came in and fired a missile at the burned-out Bradley. You can see that one on tape if you like, including the TV reporter dying as he's giving his report of the situation and the missile hits.
;)
There have been at least one wedding party we blew up, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, we blew up nine kids playing in a courtyard, going after the terrorists who was supposedly in the house. We missed the target on that one to boot.
But if you think about it, the "we don't deliberately target civilians" makes perfect sense. Rumsfeld stated emphatically that what we did at Abu Ghraib "wasn't torture" because, according to the famous Rumsfeld memo, it isn't torture unless you are inflicting pain for the sole purpose of inflicing pain. And even then, it's not torture unless it leaves permanent and meaningful physical and mental scars.
In other words, it's not torture to sodomize an Iraqi with a glow stick, if the one doing the inserting does so with the belief that his actions will cause the subject to break down and spill the beans. Sodomizing someone would only be torture if the *only* reason it was occuring was for the personal pleasure of the one doing the sodomizing.
Now, surely that doesn't prove anything, it's just an analogous mode of thought. But with logic like that coming right from the top of the DoD, I certainly wouldn't put it past the military to hide behind the half-truth that they aren't targeting civilians. Sure, they aren't targeting them, but they don't go out of their way to not take a shot just because there will be some civilian casualties.
This is the same approach that the Israelis have, who routinely kill Palestinian civilians when going after Palestinian militants.
As for news sources, at least Al Jazeera provides the body count. But I haven't really found a good one yet. The best seems to be blogs and letters home from people on the ground. That stuff gives you a sense of what it's like, what's going on.
For fairness I should point out that we aren't the only ones killing civilians. A recent car bombing killed something like 28 children, celebrating the opening of the new police station. The kids were hanging out hoping American soldiers would arrive and give them candy.
Though, if you apply the Israeli logic, those kids were unfortunate but necessary losses to destroy a headquarters building of the enemy forces. They weren't the target of the car bomb, the police station was. The Americans would surely add "we had good intelligence that military personnel were inside." (Can we really buy that "good intelligence" story after not finding any WMD? After falling asleep at the switch on 9/11? Sorry I guess my opinions are showing.)
Hey, it's war, bad things happen.
But don't worry too much, Bush will fly into Baghdad next month with another plastic turkey. It will warm our hearts and make us be thankful for what we have.
Do you honestly think that every Iraqi who attacks US soldiers is on Saddam Hussein's side?
That's an excellent point. I'm about as far from a Bush supporter as you will ever find, but if any other nation's troops laid siege to the White House, you can bet your ass I would lay down my life in defense of our nation's sovereign leader. (how weird it is to find myself saying that about Dubya)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I agree that Rumsfeld and Company would be willing to kill civilians if it helped their goal, and Abu Ghraib is a good example of that.
However, I don't see why it would be beneficial to the US to kill Iraqi civilians. What the US despretely needs right now is the for the normal Iraqis to trust the troops enough that the true insurgents can be rooted out. Every time the US attacks insurgents and kills civilians, the Iraqi citizens trust us less.
I don't have much faith in the current leadership, but they must be smart enough to realize that tactically, killing civilians is the worst thing we could possibly do. And with the pressure on Bush to have a "peaceful" Iraq for the US election, I have to believe that they are being very careful.
Basically, every time an Iraqi child gets his head blown off, it is a point for the insurgents, and a loss for the US, no matter who is responsible for the blowing off of the head. The Iraqis blame the occupier, fair or not.
So this is why I insist that the US is attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and why it makes us morally better than terrorists. (Although I argued that we avoid civilians for tactical reasons, when it comes to lives, it is the ends, not the reasons, that count).
You provided some examples which contradict this. But considering what I believe (causuing civilian casualties hurts the US's goals), it seems more likely that those are honest mistakes and not intentional.
And there is a different between an honest mistake and an intentional terrorist bombing. (Which was basically my original point when this thread started). As you say, bad things happen in wars. Wars must be judged in total. So in the case of the US, the question is:
Are the civilian deaths morally justified by the end goal of a "free", or at least "free-er" Iraq?
I say it is a hesitant no, but depending on how Iraq turns out, the answer could change.
And for the insurgents, the question is:
Are the civilian deaths morally justified by the end goal of a theocratic state free of western influences
or
Are the civilian deaths morally justified by the holy law which dictates that non-muslims should be slain?
I think both of those are strong no's. The fact that the US's question is very close to being justified is why the US is morally superior to the insurgents.
I beg to differ
Keep in mind most sorties are not airstrikes.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
And you think you've shown... what... exactly? We were talking about a statistical trend and you linked to a specific instance. Irrelevant.
I certainly am not an expert on military terminology. The point stands: the military quotes a success rate for avoiding collateral damage during these "precision" airstrikes in the high ninty-percent range. There are an awful lot of airstrikes. Do the math.
I'm not saying it's bad that we don't hear all about each failed airstrike, either. As long as people know it is happening, that's the important thing.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I don't think moral superiority matters a hill of beans. If that is what gives you comfort in supporting the war, so be it. But morality is not necessarily == rationality (and I'm not too happy about the subject line US military == terrorists either).
Looking at the morality is a convenient way to not have to look at the reality. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Israelis vs. the Palestinians. Why is there no peace? Because neither Arafat nor Sharon would profit from peace. Civilians don't enter into the equation, except in the case of Sharon, and only to the extent that they seem quite happy to vote for the man who believes the best defense is a strong offense.
Undoubtedly, every dead Iraqi is "point" for the insurgents. Or maybe it's better stated that it takes a point away from the Americans, for I don't think too many Iraqis are in favor of getting blown up, regardless of who's blowing them up. Our failure to protect for the very people we're liberating is, I think, the clearest sign that we are losing. There doesn't seem to be any decrease in the car bombings or IEDs either.
Before the war, and still now, I was of the opinion that it wasn't worth losing U.S. lives to depose Saddam. But this was not a moral judgement. In fact it was probably pretty immoral, since I am quite content to let people suffer wherever they might be in the world, so long as it's not my own country. There's plenty of injustice here in America to keep us busy without trying to save the rest of the world.
But this is all moot anyway. The official reason for this war was never to liberate Iraq, it was to prevent the transfer of Saddam's WMD to terrorists. "We don't want the warning sign to be a mushroom cloud" or whatever it was Condi said.
It seems like now that that's accomplished, we've searched high and low and not found the WMD, we might as well just get the hell out.
The other lesson from this war is: If our lean and mean military can't cut it in Iraq, we have absolutely no chance of taking on Iran or North Korea without a serious increase in troops (or using nukes, which of course would be immoral). Maybe we'd be able to handle Syria, but undoubtedly we'd get some help (or the perception would be that were were in cahoots with) Israel and then we'd have the same problem we have in Iraq; that of being occupiers and not liberators.
Finally, I have significant doubts about the plan to create a democratic Iraq. The US has a long track record of subverting democracy, including the CIA coup in Iran in 1953 which installed the puppet monarchy of the Shah. You can pretty much draw a direct line from CIA coup in 1953 to Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. Why should things be any different now?
Maybe I don't have much in the way of morals. I guess the only issue I can think of where my morality comes into it is abortion, and strangely I'm of the opinion that baby killing is just fine, since said baby resides in a host who has the ultimate right to decide whether or not she wants to play incubator.
Okay so perhaps my response has suffered some "mission creep." To sum up: Your argument is that it's morally superior to kill civilians in the cause of a free Iraq than it is to kill civilians in the cause of an Islamist Iraq. I trust that you can at least understand how an Islamist would find his killing of civilians to be the killings which are justified. From his perspective, he is fighting for a free Iraq -- one free of foreign invaders. What can be a more moral cause than defending one's homeland?
Personally I say let's just stop the killing. Unilaterally. Maybe we can't get Islamists to stop blowing up their own country, but we have no obligation to stick around and blow it up more.
Geraldo spills military secrets
(the bridge was taken by the US on April 2nd, and the counterattack mentioned in the article was at 3AM on April 3rd)
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
Yeah, let's abandon our lone ally in the Middle East, its only democracy. Let's allow all the Arab nations to drive Israel into the ocean.
Then Bin Laden will like us!
Let's abandon our friends when they needs us, just like France does. Yeah, that's the country I want to be, France.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude."
Apology accepted in advance.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Then is Republicanism where John Ashcroft can send your son to die for him?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
In case I haven't mentioned it lately, you're a fucking idiot.
Maybe we should make this a yearly reminder.
I'll set an alert in my PIM.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
You have an anger problem, which seems to be true of most Bush supporters. Bush supporters find it very easy to justify killing other people, and don't realize that some of those killed will have family members who will want to retaliate.
And, you didn't read the books.
--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.
On the other hand you're getting a deal on their wagesr e four fourty hour weeks, 160 hours a month
Monthly Pay:
E-1:1193.40
E-2:1337.70
E-3:1407.00
Figu
E-1: $7.46
E-2: $8.36
E-3: $8.79
Now, you have lots of other benefits, but ask yourself. Does that really counterbalance the three months to a year over in the desert, with the chance of being shot or blown up, if you're not a patriot?
I don't read AC A human right
People seem to have forgotten what military victory is. The basic definition is having removed your enemy's desire to fight. (Whether that comes at the cost of your desire to fight is irrelevant.) You can seize all the land you want, but you won't really own it until the enemy stops trying to take it back.
What that means a long time ago was killing all the enemy's soldiers or sending them packing home out of fear. That doesn't work for today's military. First, killing a lot of men will not help in the reconstruction process. We learned from WWI that winning the war is not enough - we need to set up a stable government that will reduce the desire to fight in the future. Second, if we go through and kill a lot of people, that also means we have to kill their leaders as well, which could be very powerful allies in the future.
So what is a modern military victory? It is bankrupting the enemy. When the enemy cannot pay their soldiers, cannot buy spare parts, and cannot continute taxation against its population, and the population is starving, it is a simple matter of riding into town with food and water and promising the world while you set up a new government.
How does this work with terrorism? Simple. Terrorists need recruits. They get these recruits through brainwashing via the media and via the madras (Islam schools). All we have to do is go in and shut down the broadcasting stations and the madras and replace them with some more worthwhile activity - universities and schools. If the people latch onto the new infrastructure, they will distance themselves from the terrorists that try to recruit them. It's really easy to convince a boy who has a starving family that the only way to salvation is through murder. But convincing a wealthy happy family with all their basic needs met that the boy should go out and give up his promising future to murder some people is a lot more difficult.
Combine that with the effects of democracy. When something is not right in the society, they will hold a vote. And that will be that. There will never be a majority that distances it from the government - it will always embrace it. People will be encouraged to work together and to cooperate with their enemies (thus leading to the two-party system, incidentally) to get what they want. Rather than blow people up, they will form coalitions. Terrorists will lose.
Bottom line: bankrupt the terrorist economy. Get rid of their supply of "ammo" - young Islam boys - and provide them with a more effective means of expressing themselves.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Sherman tanks did indeed have an advantage in numbers, but they were so lightly armored that they were known by the soldiers as rolling coffins.
Being put in a Sherman was pretty much a death sentence. Few Sherman crews managed to survive a long time in those things. Back in WW2, lots of losses were the norm and conscription provided replacement manpower.
Now with a volunteer army, the U.S. military invests a lot of money in training its soldiers, and doesn't have large amounts of replacements.
Even if human life is cheap, it's much cheaper to build expensive things that protect personnel than to constantly be training lots of replacements for those that were lost. Not only do you have to spend all the money to replace them, the soldiers' experience gained on the battlefield is also lost. An experienced soldier is a lot more effective than a new recruit.
The cheap, lightly-armored, swarming approach would probably be very effective for Chinese army, where they have manpower out the ears (due to population and conscription), and don't place much value on human life.
You know, the one thing that has NOT been looked into was, with the odds of 10 to 1, held a KEY bridge, AND lived to tell the tale. Amazing.
"Where is the weakest place on your enemy?" - Amos Sten
You're still not getting it.
You prepare in advance. You don't start preparing after you've been fighting in the theater for 6 months.
It is just not true that the US occupiers only shut down newspapers inciting violence. They shut one down that was the equivalent of the Weekly World News -- bizarre stories and rumors that everyone knew were untrue but read for entertainment value. A lot of anti-coalition rumors, but no incitement of violence. And they shut down Al-Jazeera! Boarded it up!! Say what you want about al-Jazeera, but they don't incite violence there!
That's stupid. Their methodology is clear and explained for anyone to critique. Their agenda is to get as accurate as possible a count of civilian casualties in Iraq. Their numbers are actually very low because their methodology is so rigorous. They only accept deaths that have been recorded in at least two news sources. The real numbers are probably significantly higher than what they report.
Falkland Islands
Grenada
Panama
None of those military occupations lasted even a year. They were short-time, low-casualty occupations.
But if you don't include casualties in the invasion, the occupations of Germany and Japan after WWII inflicted few casualties. (There were some guerilla fighting, but not of the magnitude we see in Iraq today.)
Those occupations also lasted many years, as opposed to the short/medium-lenght occupations of Iraq.
Falklands, Panama, Grenada: Low invader casualty invasion. Low casulaty occupation. Short time.
Germany and Japan: Very high invader casualty invasion. Low casualty occupation. Long time.
Iraq: Low invader casualty invasion. Medium allied casualty occupation. Medium time.
We invade Iraqi airspace and you claim it is their fault?
Uhm. WTC car bomb?
Uganda-Tanzania War: Do you have figures for this one? I only found this.
Denmark: True, Denmark gave up quickly when the capital was captured.
Norway:_When you say raids, maybe you also include the heavy fighting around Narvik by allied expeditionary forces, considered the first allied victory in the war? All right, we won't count those. But you're still wrong about German casualties: 1000 German sailors died in the sinking of the battleship Bl*cher alone.
No, it's that other characteristic of geeks - they're pussies.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I agree. Please explain to me which part of the following sentence you do not understand:
"To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude."
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
The death toll of 9/11 is still higher then the number of soldiers killed. It tells you something both about the enermous strength of america that in the ground battle it simply couldn't be touched and the enormous weakness that a small squad armed with cheap knives could do so much damage.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ironically, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf's most famous alleged [self?] deceit was actually 100% true. When he claimed there were no American troops at Sadaam International Airport he was correct.
So al-Sahaf told the truth on camera at least once. I'm still investigating Rumsfeld.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin