If you've been following the various reports of the ambush of the 507th maintenance battallion during the recent campaign in Iraq, you'll probably want to read this article at Rantburg. It's a report that all the weapon maintenance records from the 507th were destroyed during the ambush. Also according to the article, multiple weapons types malfunctioned during the ambush, and not just M-16's/M4's.
This was originally part of the previous post. I think it makes sense on its own.
I'd like to say that I think Lileks is right. We are currently wildly successful compared to where I feared we'd be for the rest of the month of September back in '01. We're free to complain about trivial things. We're all not cautiously poking our heads out of our bunkers to embark on yet another foray into the ruins for canned food. Life has returned to semi-normalcy. As far as the larger war we're fighting, I see lots of opportunity for informed criticism, but very little actual instances of such. Most of the critics seem to work from a template comparing the current conflict to the Vietnam War, without ever actually suggesting how they would have fought to win that war, much less this one.
(And no, I don't think Russian peacekeepers or the like are the answer, for reasons I've already gone into in previous posts. Nor do I think highly of retired generals who've successfully predicted thirty or so of the Army and Marines' last two defeats. It actually makes it harder for the people who would like to make informed criticism to do so when there are people who have soapboxes on the major news networks setting out to create enough panic to turn victories into defeats. Which is a Vietnam analogy I rarely see anyone else making these days.)
(I guess this is a way of saying that while I disagree with some of the things Rumsfeld does, I also disagree with a lot of the criticisms that everyone else is making, especially when they're the people who had, for a long while, the budgetary authority to help fix most of the problems I see but didn't seem interested in actually fixing the problems.)
And sooner or later, we're going to have to decide whether or not it's "moral" or not to actually fight "guerrillas," or more accurately, whether or not it's moral to fight back against guerrillas and/or those enemy combatants pretending to be native insurgents.
One of the essays that's hitting the inside of my skull with a brick, begging to be written, is concerning language, strategy, tactics, and limited vs. total war. It's turning out to be harder to write than I thought, but I recently read the following on LGF by James Wittenbach, who's obviously thinking along the same lines: "Calling this a 'War on Terrorism' is like calling World War II a 'War on Messerschmitts.'" (At least that's who I think wrote it. Going to the probable author's web page, it seems he's a science fiction writer... and he needs a publisher... HMM. Time to post and run some errands.
I haven't written anything about the recent anniversary because I've been busy, and because I'm at a loss for words. Even if I weren't, I doubt I could match what Lileks wrote here in his usual bleat. Also of note is an account I read by a survivor of the WTC attack, that was first posted on "Hollywood Halfwits" and later reposted at Little Green Footballs. Later this weekend, I may try to write a quick post on language, tactics and strategy, and the whole question of just what terrorism is. But half the stuff I was going to build it around is at home, and I'm currently sitting at CC's Coffee, with my laptop, trying to post over the whine of the expresso machines. I wonder if I should try to paraphrase everything...
Lockheed dropped a 200 million dollar weather satellite while rotating it. Courtesy of spacetoday.net, here's the space.com news article, and a spaceref post with pictures.
I'm speechless.
Via Rantburg's Short Attention Span Theater, there's this story about a guy who mailed himself from Dallas to Michigan. I've never been to Dallas myself, so I can't say whether it's really that bad.
Over at "Oriental Redneck," there are two interesting posts up, one where Tony Kim writes about Korean women "gaming" the laws of the US in order to get US citizenship for their kids, and then moving back to Korea. As they say on other sites, read the whole thing. He also has another post about the Stryker Wheeled APC and the legislative process which brings to mind Bismark's famous statement about law, order, and sausage.
'Swen' Swenson, author of the 'blog "Coyote At The Dogshow," comments here on a dispute going on at the University of Pennsylvania over whether or not the graduate students there should form or join a union.
Click here to generate your own personalized battlecry, complete with blunt or sharp instrument.
Just a quick note to Sea Wasp that he might enjoy this article, originally from the Wall Street Journal, on Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism in the US.
A couple more interesting links I've seen on LGF: First, totalitarians in Europe are taking a rather different approach to their usual whining. Second, there is currently some small debate going on in Jordan on the subject of honor killings.
I know this is an old item, but just for the sake of reference I wanted a link to LGF's pictures of these murals.
I'm interested in getting the book Ki in Everyday Life , both for myself and possibly for someone else, but I'd like to hear from someone who has read it first, about whether it's any good. I'm looking for good books on meditation in particular right now.
And as always, we thank you for your support.
I also ran across this article at Strategypage by Jim Dunnigan that predicts further difficulties in Iraq, because many of the international "peacekeeping" troops coming in aren't as good as US and British troops at winning and keeping the hearts and minds of a populace. I've been trying to think of countries besides the US and the UK that have large militaries but lack large-scale corruption, and failing.
The Columbians have experience with fighting guerrilla war, and recent reports say they're winning their war, but they're still fighting it. (Someone remind me to check up on that). I believe the Peruvians had some successes in rolling back the Shining Path, but I don't know if that means they'd be successful in Iraq. I keep seeing Russian troops suggested; they were both the main sponsors of the previous regime, and are still running into problems in Chechnya. I don't know how many troops they still have present there, or what the population is there, but I ran into one report, dated sometime in 2000, that said they had more troops than there was population left in the country. I suspect they'd be successful at creating more trouble, but not good at controlling it. The Japanese would be good, but have legal limitations on deploying troops abroad. The South Koreans are good at civil affairs, but their troops are needed at home right now. The Turks, because of their history in the area, might be problematic.
If a UN-approved occupation force were the panacea for US manpower problems it's being made out to be, why can't they just take over from US forces in Bosnia and Kosovo? Also note, the populace in those areas reportedly prefers US peacekeepers to UN-commanded international brigades.
Maybe we should be looking at recruiting policemen to send over, rather than soldiers. For what we actually need done, some reasonably honest, responsible cops might be a good choice.
Just an idle thought.
Addendum: I changed some minor wording, and added a trackback ping to "Winds of Change," where they've been discussing the issue in this entry.
Something struck me regarding the previously cited Rantburg post, and Prince Aziz. He was referred to as
...Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd’s and a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby....
I wonder what they mean, precisely, by "Westernized."
The other thing that's been bugging me lately is that the recent bombing in Iraq happened in Najaf, at the tomb of Ali. As far as I know, Ali is one of the first major historical figures to go from being (in the eyes of the "mainstream" of Islam) a righteous, pious man (and heir-designate of the Prophet Mohammed, if the Shi'a are to be believed), to just another Godless Apostate, all because he lost his battles with the would-be Caliph of the time. I don't know as much as I should about the history of the Middle East, but what I do know suggests that a very sad story has come full circle, to the beginning, in the very place it began. I wonder how much longer we're going to have to wait for the Middle East in general to grow up and come up with a better method of establishing legitimate authority than just starting another civil war. And no, I don't think "starting another civil war and then getting the Americans involved" counts.