Archive for the 'War & Warfare' Category

Small Wars Journal (“Why The U.S. Military Culture Leads To Defeat”).

“Sir – it’s the TEA”   

The Target Engagement Authority was a US one star who sat in the joint operations center in Erbil, with the task of approving and controlling all Coalition fires in Northern Iraq.  I took the headset, preparing myself for the argument that I knew was coming.

“Andy, are you firing mortars”,

“Yes sir”,

 “What the hell is going on?”

 “Sir, the Pesh are getting mortared in the breach.  I’ve got an OP less than 500 meters away.”

“Are US personnel taking fire?”

“Not yet, sir”

“Then you’re not authorized to make that decision” 

“Sir – it’s a matter of one correction before our guys get hit too — I’m not going to wait for that to happen”, 

“That’s not up to you Colonel, that’s my decision — cease fire now!”

[ … ]

My introduction seems a lot to surmise from an isolated case of poor leadership, a single data point carrying by itself insufficient weight to yield such generalizations about the US military. Except, that this exchange was one of many similar incidents over my career, and the TEA, a General Officer with impressive background and unsullied reputation, was not someone I could simply dismiss as being a poor leader.  Instead, he was the product of an institution imbued with a cultural preference for centralized control and procedure.  It’s a culture that has evolved – as cultures often do – because of a view of the world, that appears rational to members of the organization. But that view no longer matches reality – if indeed it ever did – and the culture it has produced is proving harmful to the institution, its members – and the nation itself.

His experience doesn’t differ in the least from the awful ROE I’ve document in Iraq and especially Afghanistan.  The micromanagement was astounding, and men perished because if it.  As I’ve documented about the U.S. Marine Corps work in the Helmand Province, Gen. David Rodriguez, that awful imposter of a man, demanded to be at the top of the chain of approval for every artillery shell launched in combat.  Every single one.

But the author is making excuses.  The culture is a reflection of the men who lead it.  Leaving aside the issue of whether we should have been in Iraq (we shouldn’t have) or how we conducted the campaign in Afghanistan (much differently), when men are engaged in warfare, it requires men with souls to win it.

Heartless men, men who have jettisoned their last remaining vestiges of morality, decency, belief system and love for their fellow warriors, have no business in politics or war, and yet it seems that’s all we’ve got

Fred.

Limited war is NOT war … You can’t fight a war of defense only and win.

Whoever (the UN?) came up with the doctrine of limited warfare needs to be taken out back and shot, bulldozed into an open grave, burned, the earth salted, and the history books to all point out how totally retarded that notion is.

Lessons from history.

The superiority of tactics and training over equipment.

At reddit/Firearms.  I can’t guarantee the video will stay up.

Ridiculous.  After wasting the blood of the sons of America on that shit hole, the ANA surrenders en masse to the Taliban.

The men who sent Americans to perish in that war have blood on their hands and will answer to God for their actions.  We fought a campaign of armed social justice.

But hey.  At least the bankers and defense contractors got rich.  That’s the point of war, right?

This is a debate I want to steer clear of, except to say that I think any civilian should be able to purchase any guns or tactical equipment available to the U.S. military.  I also think that pretending isn’t doing, and while pretension over YouTube is innocent enough (and I really don’t care about that sort of thing even though it seems to bother Dakota), the real problem with this sort of thing is with militarized police.  I notice Dakota Meyer says nothing about that.  Militarized police are the standing army that so worried the American founders.  Let’s see Dakota take that one on.  How about it, Dakota?  I think it would be awesome if a MoH winner would point out to SWAT teams around the nation that they should fly across the pond if they really want to do that sort of thing, and that Americans have rights.  So are you all in on this?

On another front (and changing the subject, for which I don’t apologize), following the comments on this video, and then on to other comments on other forums, and so on down the road like a spider web, I notice that there is an awful lot of apprehension in the reports given by Marcus Luttrell in his after action report and book.  I have said a good bit about Operation Red Wings, and I may have more to say about this operation in the future.

But for now it’s enough to point out that the operation was a total flop, and the main instigator of the trouble, Ahmad Shah, and his band of bad boys, had to be killed by Marines in Operation Whalers.  The Navy SEALs learned of Marine Corps plans and decided to take the action away from Marines.  This was a huge mistake.

Finally, I’ll point out two more things about Operation Red Wings.  First from Mohammad Gulab, who saved Marcus, and next, from a Marine Corps infantry officer.

On the night of June 27, 2005, with a sense of dread creeping over him, Luttrell and his fellow SEALs—Michael Murphy, Matthew Axelson and Danny Dietz—headed out for a recon mission in a dangerous part of Kunar province near the Pakistani border. A sniper and a medic, Luttrell packed a scoped military assault rifle and 11 magazines—three more than usual, he wrote in Lone Survivor.

While Luttrell wrote that he fired round after round during the battle, Gulab says the former SEAL still had 11 magazines of ammunition when the villagers rescued him—all that he had brought on the mission.

Gulab wasn’t the first to question the accuracy of Lone Survivor. In his 2009 book, Victory Point, the journalist Ed Darack wrote about the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment in Afghanistan, the unit that planned the mission. He uncovered a bevy of discrepancies in Luttrell’s account. Some are small: He got the name of the operation wrong—it was Red Wings, like the hockey team, not Redwing. Others are more significant: The target, Ahmad Shah, wasn’t an international terrorist or a close bin Laden associate. He was the head of a small Taliban-linked militia. Citing reports gleaned from phone and radio intercepts, Darack estimates only eight to 10 militants attacked the SEALs, not 80 to 200. In fact, two graphic videos the gunmen shot during the firefight show only seven men in Shah’s militia.

“[Luttrell’s claims] are exaggerated nonsense,” says Patrick Kinser, a former Marine infantry officer who participated in Operation Red Wings and read the former SEAL’s after action report. “I’ve been at the location where he was ambushed multiple times. I’ve had Marines wounded there. I’ve been in enough firefights to know that when shit hits the fan, it’s hard to know how many people are shooting at you. [But] there weren’t 35 enemy fighters in all of the Korengal Valley [that day].”

Take careful note.  I’m not saying that Luttrell’s account is wrong or exaggerated.  Others are saying that.  I make no claim to knowing these things for certain.  But I think it’s interesting, and I also think there is a lot more study to be done about this fateful operation, why it should never have been conducted, and the specific failures in personnel, weapons, tactics, techniques and procedures.

I’ve often wondered why the SEALs would have taken radio equipment only to be frustrated by mountains when trying to communicate their predicament (and ultimately killing Murphy), when they could have carried a sat phone with a MilStar uplink?

But one thing is for sure by all accounts, including post-mortem and forensic reviews.  Matthew Axelson was a stud.  He continued to lay down fires even after being shot in the head, up to and including emptying both his rifle and pistol and all backup magazines.

This is a story that in my opinion is yet to be fully told.

Prior: A Marine Corps View Of Tactics In Operation Red Wings

Note the statement by Kissinger, who for all of his elitist, globalist faults, was correct in this: “A conventional army loses if it does not win.  The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

Instapundit posted this on the lockdowns, but all of the links are broken.  Shocker.

But via WRSA, this video explains the entire issue.

You’ve been had.

I had seen other analyses of the tunnel rats, but this expose does even better at outlining the extent of the networks.

Breitbart.

Soldiers were told the list came from the Department of Homeland Security and was an updated list of what federal and local law enforcement need to be “on the lookout for,” according to the source.

Henry “told us that if anyone gets caught wearing, buying, selling, affiliated with in any way, any of those things on those list, that the first thing he’s going to do is chapter us out of the Army. The second thing is, he’s going to handle the investigation by sending it over to the DHS,” the source said. “He didn’t quite outright say that we would be arrested, he used the word ‘detained.’”

Some of the imagery on the slides clearly refer to hate symbols, such as a swastika or other Nazi-related symbols. However, also included is “Pepe the Frog” — an internet meme frequently posted by members of the political right to troll the political left.

[ … ]

More worrying for some soldiers, however, is the list’s inclusion of imagery popular among members of the military long before the racial unrest of the summer of 2020, such as the “Three Percenters” symbol — the Roman numeral III with 13 stars around it.

In fact, until recently, graduates of the SWMG’s Trauma III course had the option to buy a shirt with a Three Percenter logo on the front, the source said.

“Now those shirts, all of them have to be thrown away, and cannot be worn again and they have to change the logo because it’s been associated with these extremist behavior,” the source said.

[ … ]

I was 18 when I got it. It was described to me as the percentage of colonists that rose up against the government of the British … . I was like, ‘Wow, that is such an American sentiment, a patriotic sentiment.’ Coming from a military family, I thought that really spoke to me. I always was proud to be an American. I’m very proud to be an American.

Rohrwasser also had the American flag, “Liberty or Death,” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” tattooed on him, but nevertheless apologized for the Three Percenters tattoo and had it removed.

The slides, which are marked “law enforcement sensitive,” describe the “Three Percenters” as a “North American militia movement/paramilitary-style group with members who adhere to a far-right/libertarian ideology with a primary focus on firearms ownership right and opposition to expansive U.S. federal government authority.

Well, firearms ownership is a right granted by God.  And most people with a brain and a conscience are opposed to totalitarianism.

Good Lord.  He apologized for a tatoo?  He had it removed?  That’s painful and expensive from what I understand.

So I guess we’re left to conclude that the DHS, to whom people with tattoos are to be turned over, think that the war of independence was immoral and would have been in support of continuing to be subjects of the king?

What else could we conclude?

Anyway, hopefully ‘Karen’ feels safer today.  That’s what most important.

Via WiscoDave.