Archive for January, 2005
DefenseTech points out a NY Times article on the Marine CH-53E Super Stallion that crashed, killing all 31 aboard.
The crash was the first such incident involving a large number of casualties since November 2003, when the downing of three helicopters led to the deaths of 33 American soldiers. In the first, a Chinook helicopter was shot down near Falluja by an insurgent firing an antiaircraft missile, killing 16 soldiers and wounding 26. Later that month, two Black Hawk helicopters that were trying to avoid ground fire collided in the air above Mosul, killing 17 soldiers.After those incidents, American commanders ordered pilots to fly evasively at all times. American helicopters routinely fly at tree-top level, bobbing and weaving on their way to their destination. Like the Super Stallion that went down Wednesday, Army and Marine helicopters often fly at night, when the threat of attack is diminished. Helicopter pilots say that they are still routinely shot at from the ground but that the tactics have largely prevented the insurgents from hitting them.
MO has posted some time back on the double-edged sword of attack ‘copter use:
Helicopters are an incredibly versatile military vehicle, and we certainly won’t be phasing them out any time soon. Unless the Area 51 guys are working on anti-grav vehicles, of course. But World War III deep strike tactics, flying far behind enemy lines and attacking strong enemy ground forces, may result in losses greatly exceeding the returns, especially against enemy units consisting mainly of light infantry and irregulars. In these days of JDAM satellite-guided aerial bombs, J-STARS “ground AWACS”, and real-time targeting, perhaps the deep strike missions by attack helicopters are no longer needed.But helicopters themselves will contribute greatly to our military for years to come. When the army called off the deep strikes and instead assigned Apaches to close ground support of the men and tanks on the ground, the results were astounding. Although the missions are not as “sexy” as Airwolf-type assaults, helicopters can be incredibly valuable members of infantry and armor attacks. They provide maneuverability, a good vantage point, and incredible firepower when employed as part of a combined-arms assault. Even in Mogadishu, the Little Bird gunships were invaluable to the US troops making it through the night.
The same vulnerabilities that attack choppers face make support choppers vulnerable. But despite these problems, the advantages that helicopters provide far outweigh the danger. Air transport has cut down on enemy opportunities to bomb roadways, making our supply lines far more secure. The ability to patrol (and pursue) from the air has undoubtedly contributed to our effort to limit insurgent attacks.
But helicopters remain fragile. And their operating environment and the severity of consequence that mishaps bring make them more than a little dangerous at times.
“Fighters of the Army of Mouhammad” Terrorize Citizens
An FoD correspondent in the Babel province writes:
A citizen who refused to give his name said he was threatened and blackmailed, along with other people, to pay over a million. Threat comes through messages left at citizens’ doors bearing the signature of what is called the “Fighters of the Army of Mouhammad.” This man had to use his personal monies for fear of being killed or kidnapped.A police spokesman did not deny this, confirming that crimes of this sort have been occurring.
See the full report here.
I often see things along the lines of “What would Americans feel like if foreign soldiers were on our streets?” and “Would Americans want some foreign military power running our government?”. These are, in fact, good points and should not be ignored.
And how about some of these:
- How would Americans feel if our police officers were killed by outlaws simply for trying to establish law and order?
- How would Americans feel if our judges were assassinated on the streets?
- How would Americans feel if our polling centers *in schools* were bombed by suicidal fanatics desperate to keep voters from voting?
- How would Americans feel if suicide car bombers attacked the offices of one of our political parties?
- How would Americans feel if individual citizens were targeted with threats and all the police could do was say ‘Yep, that’s what’s happening’?
Would Americans demand that the soldiers all leave? That the elections be canceled because democracy won’t work here? That those foreign soldiers fighting and dying in an attempt to allow us to vote are just after our natural resources?
High-tech Stryker brigades fighting the old way, on foot
The Knight Ridder article mentioned previously here and here surfaced again in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Here are the three titles used:
- Army’s most modern high-tech forces discover hard lesson
- U.S. plan in Mosul adjusts to violence
- High-tech Stryker brigades fighting the old way, on foot [the latest]
I found this via Reason Express, which has an entry entitled Boots Are Made for Marching that includes:
Not that anyone outside the pay of the Bush administration doubts it, but from Mosul comes the most clearly articulated case yet for more troops for Iraq. There, 5,000 U.S. troops are trying to do the job once done by 20,000 and are struggling to keep a lid on the insurgency in the city.
More telling still is that the Mosul garrison is composed of the Stryker brigade, the one of the Pentagon’s newly transformed units named for the swift armored car the unit deploys.
and ends with
The catch, of course, is that the U.S. does not have any more boots to send to Mosul, a fact the men of the Stryker brigade there are all too aware of.
Since anyone who read the article they link knows that an additional 7,000 Army troops are already there, I utilized their feedback link to submit the following:
This is incorrect. In fact, that Knight Ridder article you link to notes that the Army has been sending more troops to Mosul recently and now has 7,000 non-Stryker soldiers in the city.
As Fallujah was cleared, violence in Mosul picked up. It was perpetrated largely by insurgents unlike those previously encountered in Mosul. This indicates that at least some of the recent increase is due to displaced fighters from other areas moving into more lightly-held areas, not because the Army too few troops were present in a tougher region.
Yes, more boots were needed. And they were sent. Don’t make it sound like the overstretched Army has left the Stryker brigade out to dry.
For the reasoning behind what I say, see the two previous posts on this article.
Sheesh.
Am I the only one that has trouble using CTRL-F to search large web pages in IE? IE crashes not only the instance I’m searching in, but also any other instances running. It hit me just now in a window I was searching in, so I went to the window I was writing my post in and copied my entry before clicking ‘End Program’. Fortunately, it cleared my clipboard when it closed (or something) so my post is gone.
It was a round up of links with a little commentary on each. Now it’s just a list of links:
Sorry that I don’t have time to re-write the commentary. Feel free to comment on any of these.
Comments Closed
A.E. Brain with some pics of secret signs and such. Definitely worth a look.
Ground Level Election News from the People of Iraq
Spirit of America is helping get the Friends of Democracy project off the ground in Iraq:
Iraq’s elections are an historic event. Our goal is to ensure that Iraqis and Americans get a full, accurate and in-depth picture of the elections. The major television networks and newspapers will likely provide limited coverage of Iraq’s elections that focuses on the expected violence and bad news. This partial story discourages Iraqis and disheartens those that support Iraq’s struggle for free self determination. Friends of Democracy will not be offering a “sugar-coated” picture of Iraq’s elections – just a complete and accurate one that includes more than sensational, “if it bleeds, it leads” news.
They’re rushing to get things up and running, but the goal is to get real feedback from people in each province and major city using digital cameras and the Arabic blogging tool developed by SoA.
Murdoc Online will be running an ad on the right sidebar just below the Top Spot Blogad to help promote awareness of this effort.
You can donate to either Iraq Election News or Friends of Democracy – the Iraq Democracy Project to help support this cause.
And here’s a sobering note from the FoD donation page:
In many cases we will not be able to publicize the specifics of the projects or people we are supporting as part of this effort. We will need to work quietly and we won’t be able to provide our normal level of transparency. Those who are visibly associated with Americans are much bigger targets for the terrorists.
That underscores what’s at stake. Not the measures pro-democracy workers must take, but the measures anti-democracy people will take.
I imagine that the media is going to be focused on the body count this weekend. That will certainly be part of the story, but there’s much more to it than the violence and terror. The determination to carry on in spite of that violence and terror is awe-inspiring, and that story will be the one that’s remembered years from now. If it gets told today.
Bush’s Second Inaugural Address
There are a few Lefty blogs I keep an eye on. (Yes, “Lefty” is a gross generalization, but I mean no harm.) One of them is by Ed Thibobeau, the Left Coaster who runs Nonplussed. I often stir the pot a bit at Nonplussed, and from time to time find decent debate in the comments section with Ed or his readers.
He noted a section of Bush’s innagural address:
From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.
And wrote
Kids, can you find the errors in the President’s statement? It’s well known that he is ignorant of history but you would think that the speechwriters and vetters would know a thing or two.On “the day of our founding” our political leaders actually did encode into law the notion that some are fit to be masters and some are fit to be slaves. Across the first several generations of Americans the practice was permitted to thrive. Our national ideals are indeed something to be proud of, but only a fool or an idiot would proclaim to the world that we have always followed them.
This is touches on something I’ve brought up in conversation many times and have always meant to write about but haven’t. I intended to post about it later in the week right before the Iraqi election, but Ed’s got me going a bit so I’ll point it out right now.
(And never mind that Bush said “proclaimed”, not “always followed”. That difference does tie into my point, but I don’t want to debate if we should have known what Bush meant instead of listening to what he said. I went through that with Ed over Bush’s statements that there were no ties between Saddam and 9/11.)
We all know about the Great Compromise and the injustice of it all. There’s no doubt that it did not conform to our proclaimed standards of equality. But without it there wouldn’t have been a US Constitution. It was a close-run thing the way it was.
It’s all well and good for me to sit here at my desk in all my middle-class whiteness and say that the Great Compromise was necessary. A great many people will rightly ridicule me for my gall.
But the fact remains that those in bondage would not have been freed if that shameful equation had not been worked out. They would have remained in chains within their independent states or in an earlier incarnation of the Confederate States of America.
I don’t mean to argue this point or launch a full-scale debate on the subject. What I do mean to do is point out that the Founding Fathers had a vision of near-perfection and they DID THE BEST THEY COULD AT THAT TIME.
And, being Murdoc Online, I’m sort of obligated to turn this into a corollary on World War 4. So I will.
If and when the new Iraqi constitution has a few great compromises will America’s Left get all worked up over the injustice of it all and declare the whole thing a crock? Or will they consider waiting a bit to see if maybe staggering in the right general direction is better than wallowing in the same old mud?
The Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal.
11 years later the US Constitution failed to deliver.
80 years after that, a horrific war was fought to try and rectify that shortcoming.
100 years after that, this nation went through a bitter upheaval to make what the Civil War had won a tangible reality.
40 years after that, I’d say we still aren’t there yet.
That’s 229 years from 1776 to 2005, and we still haven’t delivered completely.
Will Bush’s critics even give Iraq 229 months? 229 weeks?
And, assuming they give them at least 229 days, will they pester them continuously because the new Iraq’s actions don’t always match their words and their designs?
I’d say that we have learned some lessons along the way. We will, of course, want to instill as many of them into a new Iraq as we can. But some things you just have to learn for yourselves. For us, it was the slavery of blacks, among other things. For Iraq, it will be something different, probably either the pull of the Koran or rampant tribalism, that needs to be worked out.
Will they get a chance? Many on the Left and in the media have already proclaimed that they cannot see any possible way that this Iraq scenario can end well for anyone.
And Iraqis haven’t even had their first national election yet.
If they were critiquing the formation of the United States, they probably wouldn’t have even waited for the failure of the Articles of Confederation before declaring total defeat. Ed says (in a different post about the reports of prisoner abuse by Iraqis) that the new government in Iraq is the same as Saddam’s government was. I’d say that’s stretching things a bit, and it’s far too early to tell.
It is going to take generations for Iraq to win the struggle for democracy. Many tough, grueling generations.
Just look how long it’s taking us.
UPDATE: Expat Yank comments. Among his points:
That it first got into someone’s head that “democracy = perfection” is one of our bigger problems, because the promise is never quite the reality.
The executive summary:
Go read the post for the reasoning. Remember that this isn’t some punditry like Maureen Dowd or that clueless Murdoc idiot. These are people really in it.
I’ve noticed a lot of search engine traffic coming in to the post on the prayer request by Chaplain Lyle Shackelford in Iraq for the upcoming elections. I updated that post, since that’s where the traffic is going, but I’ll point it out here for regular readers, as well:
First off, as you can see in the comments section a note was left indicating that the person this email was originally sent to is personally known to her.Second of all, Lyle Shackelford does appear to be a genuine military chaplain.
Third, it’s too bad that we can’t just take this sort of thing at face value. But I believe this one to be the real McCoy.
Also, over a month ago I was forwarded a link by a reader about the slippery slope we may find ourselves on with respect to military chaplains given recent court rulings in non-military lawsuits: Military Chaplains, Watch Your Six — YOU May Be Next!
I meant to comment on it at the time, didn’t, and then forgot about it until this. I suggest checking it out if you’re interested in military chaplains and/or the interaction of government and religion.
Citizen Smash points out the fallacy of the “American Superman” mentality.
Funny, but it seems to be mostly non-Americans who think American thinks it’s Superman.
I can’t excerpt. This is a definite Read The Whole Thing. It’s nothing new to MO readers, but it’s stated clearly and succinctly which, errr, isn’t always the case here.
The usual “but since we’ve made mistakes in the past we’re making a mistake this time” and “but since we’re ignoring others in need of help, what gives us the right to help anywhere?” arguments predictably surface in the comments.
A few weeks before the invasion of Iraq I was told no matter what we did or how it went it would be wrong, since Iraq was a “sovereign nation” and we had no right to interfere. And a few weeks (maybe a couple of months) after the invasion of Iraq I was told that things were really changing in the world and how did we know that Saddam would still even be in power if we just would have let Iraqis deal with it themselves.
And does food and water delivered to tsunami victims count as “interference”? (via Instapundit)
