"After reading a lot of the stuff on your site, I just can't understand why the Army uses Humvees so much. They don't offer much protection at all. I also was surprised about reports of certain units having to improvise by adding armor plating on their trucks and other vehicles. You are right about how this has lead to quite a few deaths and it does not seem all that hard to solve. Maybe someday someone will do something about this because the Soldiers need better protection than this."

"Have you any idea where I can locate more information on the current status of the Stryker program as well as any information on how well it is performing in Iraq today?

The 1 st TSG (A) assists U.S. civilian/military leaders and Soldiers with studies, gear designs and professional military education materials at no charge. We send out each month an inter-active, e-magazine focused on ground maneuver; Land Power Transformation 2 ( LPT ) and on air operations, U.S. Army/Air Force Aviation Journal ( AVJ ) to our members at-large

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Defiance: What if the "Potters" Smash your "Wonderful Life"? www.youtube.com/v/-J4mN-W-p0A

SPOILER ALERT: don't read this analysis until after you have watched the movie

Bye, Bye Anne Frank, Forever, Amen

Defiance is one of the best movies ever made, period

It ranks in the top 3 movies with Frank Capra's Its a Wonderful Life (IAWL) about American life during the 20s to 40s and Oliver Stone's JFK about political conspiracy and corruption. Of these 3 films, Defiance is the most important since the decency we should all live by--vindicated in IAWL--is a self-evident conclusion if we are listening--and not allowing corruption to occur, prevents JFKs from even happening. Defiance is what happens when decency fails and corruption takes over everything; its a frightening possibility--and it explains why when we saw the movie, we were only the second couple in the place--whereas Batman: The Dark Knight was packed and standing room-only. People are afraid to go where Defiance takes them; though its a war movie, a love story, a family pic, an action-adventure flick, a metaphysical foreign film, a man-versus-wilderness survival epic...its still also a "Holocaust" drama--which turns most people off--because they are sick of the whole Anne Frank victim self-pity schtick and don't want to be reminded that they are bad and can let such things happen. Moral responsibility is not demented fun--like the Heath Ledger's Joker blowing up people with drums of gasoline and laughing hysterically about it. Nor will you probably cry watching Defiance ---yet this is EXACTLY what the film makers want--since it begins with one of the Bielski brothers shaking another to get him to stop weeping over the loss of their parents murdered by the German nazi fascists but to instead "buck-up" and FIGHT. There are other human emotions we can--and should--tap into other than sentimentality--and this film teaches us that ANGER and defiance is what's required when the "Potters" of this world smash your comfy civilian life and seek to kill you. It may not sell popcorn--but it saves lives, wins wars and preserves nations. The current generation pampered and bribed by cell phones, cars, nice clothes--only if they go along with whatever their authoritarian parents declare--have no clue about how life really works and the dangers that lurk if decency fails and corruptions are not resisted early on. Their absence from the movie theaters is a cautionary report that we are in for a harsh deja vu.

I could write volumes on Defiance , but I'm going to focus on the main aspects that will no doubt not be covered because most writers will fear to tread there as this is not some distant past events with no current relevancy. Quite the opposite; this is a confrontation with unpleasant reality--not a feel-good escape by fantasy falsehoods.

Avoiding-the-Gun Economics: but can we eat in the Forest?

The first profound choice the Bielski brothers must decide is what to do after the Nazi invaders murder their family on the farm?

If they continue to live on the farm where food is grown, they will be obvious targets--and will die like their stationary parents. Already knowing how to live in the uncivilized forest from previous experiences running from the law, they promptly and without hesitation "head for the hills". We've seen this in films before; what we haven't seen is the rebel/guerrilla fighters chose to not abandon the women and children--but take them along where they proceed to make a mini-society of 1, 500 people; its "Swiss Family Robinson" on steroids. In these times of economic uncertainty, Defiance reminds us what an ECONOMY really is.

Man must work to produce the food, drink, clothes and shelter he needs to survive on Planet Earth--which is travelling 66, 000 mph around the sun being unevenly heated as it rotates--and only gets a half-day of warmth. To get people to work together to get what is needed to survive requires an ECONOMY--where if they produce, their other needs will be met by others doing production of the things they can do to best pitch-in. The survival situation of the Bielski partisans is so dire, everyone must turn-over all their worldly possessions brought with them from past city life in order for them to be used as barter for food harvested from the land by farmers not being currently targeted because they are non-Jews. I haven't read the facts of the Bielski situation to decide if the movie is accurate on how strapped they were, but according to Wikipedia their mini-society was so strong it fixed the adjacent Soviet Soldiers' clothing and guns. So if there is a weak point in the movie, its the possible dramatic license taken to show the people starving when the majority of the world's populations live in the north latitudes where forests flourish in the mild climates north of the equator where the sun shines the hottest. There is no place on earth where nature is more abundant in food than the forest--except for the jungle. Easy-to-grow foods like potatoes and carrots should be staple foods for guerrillas.

At face value, this is the first dilemma that if not solved, nothing follows. If you stay in civilized society with an economy you will not starve, but as decency evaporates and evil corruption takes over you may be MURDERED by thugs with weapons. In another amazing act of courage, former Polish Army NCO Bielski played by Daniel Craig goes to the Warsaw, Poland ghetto where the Jews have been forced to live in and pleads for them to get-the-hell-out before they are evicted from their homes and sent to death camps. The majority of the city-dweller Jews without outdoor survival skills--smugly rationalize that they couldn't eat in the forests and chose instead to stay co-dependants even as the society they are in is slowly turning against them. The personal tragedy of Bielski's parents murder does not sway the majority who must experience a thing before they accept it as true. Fortunately for the Bielski brothers no such "frog boiling" took place; they got a clear, unambiguous "wake-up call" when their parents were murdered to make a clean break from semi-rural farm life. They were already half out of the city. Like the angels sent to extract Lot and his family from Sodom-Gomorrah in the Bible, Daniel Craig can only get a few to come with him as the majority seduced by the comforts of urban life are destroyed.

We all know 6, 000, 000 Jews died in the holocaust of German nazi death camps out of 63, 000, 000 total deaths in WW2; out of these 1, 500 chose to live in the forest with the Bielski brothers as free men and women--in defiance to evil all around them, which is both awe-inspiring and dangerous for the powers-that-be today. What Defiance shows is that if a group of people decide to flee the corrupt society they are in and start-over, they can indeed make-it if they have the required skills, some basic equipment--and a forest (unpopulated area) to hide in. And that therein lies the rub.

There may indeed be no place to run to if the evil Potters of this world take-over. This is the dire warning of the book of Revelation in the Bible about the Anti-Christ. Let's not mince words here. And this consequence is covered in the movie, too when the Germans decide to try to flush the Bielski partisans from the woods (their life sustainment logistical base) by military force.

The answer is you FIGHT.

You don't go quietly into the night.

You don't meekly get on the train that takes you to the death camps. You are already a dead man. In a metaphysical sense, all of us are dead men under the curse of sin; the question is WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? What are you going to do with the life you have? What are you going to do about evil when it confronts you?

I'm delighted Defiance was even made and widely released knowing that the establishment wants us all to be compliant, sheeple victims by feeding us a steady poisoned diet of Anne Frank type, whiny, self-pity, stuff that the men with guns cannot be resisted. They can be resisted and they must be resisted.

Do Weak Civilians Have Value in a World of Armed Thugs?

One yet another profound layer depicted in the movie, is what then happens to the Bielski mini-society--as it gets by or thrives?--depending on what your source says. The movie asks the question by implication; what good are all these "weak civilians" if a few strong men have to protect, shelter and feed them? This goes back to the typical first possible response to the war situation of leaving the weak behind and having the able-bodied men go fight the enemy we usually see in the movies. The Bielski brother played by Liev Schrieber chooses this and departs the camp to fight with the Soviet Russian Army partisans, knowing at least he will get fed.

None of the fighters can fight unless their basic the battle against the earth (TBATE) needs are met by CIVILIANS who grow or collect the food, make the clothes and the weapons for them. Read Van Crevald's Logistics in War for more details. The Soviets get their food from somewhere, its doesn't pop out a door like a plate of food from the Star Trek TV show. They have some supply lines connecting back to somewhere; if its Americans its processed food made in plants in the U.S. delivered by land/sea/air; the Soviet partisans cut deals with local farmers or stole by gunpoint--just like the Bielskis did.

What is EXTREMELY important is that the film shows that as the benevolent dictator Bielski falters for just a second, would-be dictators with evil motives wait in the wings to take over if the societal situation decays. This is EXACTLY what Hitler was and a warning that it can happen anywhere even in the smallest of human groups (societies). One of the armed men decides that he and his peers are doing the real "manly" heavy lifting for society and deserve more food than the "lowly civilians" who do not have to leave the base camp. This is EXACTLY the smug, narcissism of many people in the U.S. military today. When wise dictator Bielski reminds him that everyone contributes and everyone shares the same ration of food, he refuses to drop his snobby egotism in the face of factual logic. As Daniel Craig gets ill he begins to brutalize the others and takes more food because he has muscles and guns. This is EXACTLY what happens in weak societies where thugs push weak people around who are women and children with at best weak men and no guns. In a larger, thriving society with certificates given for economic participation (money) such thugs can be paid off with more money $$$ than they deserve to appease them, but in a small camp, town, village where everything is visible, and there is no money, the very survival is at risk. If the weak people give in to the evil dictator--perhaps caving in to his promises of a better economy--they may in the short term prosper but in the long run be taken on a ride to destruction when he fully applies his evil plans--which is exactly how Hitler took over Germany because the people were starving.

Daniel Craig answers this militaristic, fascist threat before he gets too weak by shooting the wannabe-be dictator on-the-spot. This is exactly what should have been done to Hitler in the 1930s. What's interesting is that the Bielskis did teach the womenfolk how to shoot guns and they had them and could have shot the would-be dictator themselves. However, the armed thugs would likely be better at gunplay than them and might prevail. The point here is that a lot of Islamic countries with weak, docile populations are not able to keep their armed thugs in check from attacking another country by any kind of peer pressure of logic nor policemen with guns to preserve any kind of law & order. Some men cannot be reasoned with because they are full of evil will; something logical Jews cannot fathom with their over-bearing intellects.

What's great about Defiance is it shows the true human condition that the evil is in ALL of us; even if we flee the evil cities, we take with us the same seeds that if allowed to fester can bring a Hitler to power. We must not worship men in uniform doing the military/police functions of society lest we create such arrogant monsters who will think they are better than everyone else and demand they be placed in charge. Craig's Bielski after shooting the would-be Hitler offers to everyone that they can leave the camp (mini-society) at any time--that they are always free men and women.

Social Responsibility is Heroism

As said before, the Bielski brothers could have just been Soldiers and taken care of their own personal needs by sticking to themselves and/or joining a nation-state society's army. They chose instead to be socially responsible and make an economy--a life for themselves and the people around them--by creating an economy with jobs for them all to do. This ethos is lacking in today's businessman who only want to profit for himself and has no feelings at all towards his brothers and sisters to make a "wonderful life" for them. Its hard work providing jobs (functions) for others to do; while its true a society of 1, 500 can produce a greater variety of goods/services than 15 can it shouldn't be done just because there is greater strength in superior numbers. People have value, period. Craig's Bielski gets it. He understands that its not what we do that makes us have value its the fact that we are HUMAN BEINGS that makes us have value. We are of far greater value than a rock. He has DECENCY. His foremost defiance against the evil around him is that he and all those around him will be DECENT human beings--no matter what.

So in essence, he is defying not just German invaders but evil human nature itself. He is George Bailey with a submachine gun.

TechnoTactical: With Today's Technology It Can be Done Even Better

The non-linear war military implications depicted in the film are enormous; with today's technology gathering water and purifying it is no problem with portable, hand-held devices. For 1, 500 people no fires would be needed to boil water that could otherwise give away the camp presence to the enemy. With Gore-tex and wicking and insulating layer clothing, no heating fires, either. Shelters could be built underground a few inches and get a constant 50 degree temperature as well as concealment from enemy observation with some limited protection from kinetic energy and high explosive fires. Enemy weapons and ammo captured from them actually sustains the fight. Better camouflage would have averted detection by the Storch fixed-wing observation planes that called-in Stuka dive bombers on the camp. This is all, well-known guerrilla warfare 101 well-practiced by folks like the Vietnamese. The key ingredient is CLOSED TERRAIN to hide the guerrillas from easy detection by enemies with war machines.

Food remains the chief problem for guerrilla groups since they cannot afford to stay in one place long enough to grow crops. Herding animals that graze off the land for milk/cheese is another option but noisy and hard to conceal in large numbers. The movie showed the one-time slaughter of a horse to feed the starving camp. What is needed is some renewable food type that can be collected on-the-go to sustain military operations without any supply lines connecting back to static farmers.

Bielski's partisans do not employ some of these sound practices--which is not surprising that their military knowledge base is that of a peacetime 1930s Polish army corporal--and are forced to flee a German infantry division in an uncamouflaged, clusterfuck column as the armed men act as a rear guard to engage their pursuers. Resistance groups should practice constantly moving themselves and their base camp to a high standard of speed and camouflage. Having spies in the nearby villages for intel on what the enemy forces are doing is also a must for early warning and was well depicted in the film.

The BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM

POWER POINT PRESENTATION http://www.combatreform.org.com/BATTLEBOXattackgliderv1.0.ppt

Some traditionalists may cite that the current Airborne Operation which is derived from post-WW2 decisions to stop crash-landing fixed-wing gliders and to parachute airdrop everything from t-tail, rear ramp STOL aircraft as "AOK" and there is no need to drastically improve anything. This is a recipe of complacency sure to deliver us a feast of disaster--or worse irrelevancy of disuse since cleaning up all those parachutes is costly and time-consuming and the lazy would rather ride in noisy helicopters and land with the enemy long gone or get creamed in fuel-packed, contraptions packed full of men like sardines. The potential disaster lies in exposing USAF fixed-wing delivery aircraft to fly overhead drop zones and to release parachutes at low altitudes where AAA gun and missile fire abound. While we can and should field Russian-style, drogue-chute activated parachutes to enable high altitude, delayed opening to stay above AAA fires, the creation of a horizontal stand-off using a ram-air, forward thrust parachute to deliver large loads like a high technology M113 Gavin light tracked tank is dangerous and scares the shiite out of today's uninspired Paratroopers who want to cling to the aprons of their Airborne mothers. Large, ram-air parachutes can be deployed in the air after release but if they should fail lives would be lost if bail-outs can't be effected casting doubt on the whole glider stealth assault concept needlessly just because we have self-limited ourselves to trying to pop out glider wings from the post-WW2 Airborne rear ramp equipped aircraft. Moreover, the best glide ratios we could achieve from a parachute glider wing is 10-to-1; which is far less than what an already built fixed structure glider can attain.

Much has been lost by our decision to not employ gliders emanating from the Chase CG-20 rear ramp glider being fitted with engines and becoming a re-usable STOL transport; as the C-123 Provider; which then needed 2, 000 feet of flat runway to land--thusly, we lost in the process the WW2 glider ability to crash-land heavy equipment and intact small units onto any relatively flat open area. The USAF pampers its aircraft let alone allows them to be crash-landed onto unimproved ground--which the Army needs to deploy into to achieve strategic, operational and tactical surprise against alert enemies who are keen to defend existing runways and airfields with such flat surfaces. Yes, we can and we should field air-cushion landing systems (ACLSs) to our C-17s, C-130s and C-27s to open up many new areas to airlanding beyond pre-existing runways. However, these will have to be areas that are safe or made safe first of the enemy; so we still need an ASSAULT crash-land capability that can by stealth take over the first ground for the follow-on Airborne echelons.

Of course you will see we are building a case for the return of the glider and we are sure the whole WW2 tow-rope snapping, "ooops! this-isn't-where-we-wanted to-land" cliches' are likely to pop into your mind's eye if you have studied WW2 glider operations. You should already answer these objections if your mind is open and aware of common high technologies like kevlar and GPS and night vision aids. However, we are proposing something even better than the WW2 tow planes-dragging-a-glider-behind-it paradigm. The crafty and thrifty British in WW2 when actually glider landing light tanks by large Hamilcar gliders realized that IT TAKES FAR MORE POWER TO GET A GLIDER IN THE AIR FROM A STANDSTILL THAN IT TAKES TO KEEP IT IN THE AIR ONCE ITS AIRBORNE. They proposed that a twin-engined P-38 Lightning fighter-bomber be attached to the TOP of a Hamilcar glider holding a light tank and after towed by an obsolete bomber into the air, it would release its rope and FLY ITSELF TO THE OBJECTIVE AREA using the fighter-bomber's engine power. Then, near the target area the glider could be released from either a high stealthy stand-off or close-in at lower altitudes--with the P-38 then able to fly ahead and gun strafe and bomb any enemies on the ground or even shoot down any enemy fighters that may threaten. This eliminates the whole tow plane non-sense to just at the departure airfield to get the combination aloft; the tow planes can land right away and launch more attack glider combos so fewer numbers are needed. If you are really bold, the tow plane can be eliminated entirely if JATO rockets are used to blast the "Attack-Glider" into the air.

Why Attack-Gliders Today?

Now Luddites might again whine that we don't need Attack-Gliders because with air-to-air refueling we can extend the range of our current fighter-bombers indefinitely yadda yadda...This is true--MAYBE. The fact is we don't have enough tankers and are desperately trying to convert French airliners into tankers just to keep our air superiority F-22s and F-15s in the air. The sad truth is like in WW2, transporting the Army is always a low priority with the fighter jock USAF that wants to win wars all by themselves using firepower not ground maneuver. Transports will be left on their own like the C-141Bs that were bounced by Cuban MIGs en route to Panama in 1989. Fortunately Castro decided to mind-his-own-business and no men were lost--but that our transport planes were sent on defense-less was immoral and incompetent and all should be armed at least with self-defense air-to-air missiles if the fighter jocks are too busy trying to Warden-style strategic bomb with their lawn darts to provide fighter escort. LTG Gavin created the night parachute jump because he knew the fighter jocks were unwilling and/or unable to provide necessary fighter escort. The Army is not alone in the neglect; the USAF doesn't want to escort its own lower-life-form bomber pilots, either. To try to insure bombers get fighter escort they created a FICON parasite fighter concept where a bomber carried a F-84 (why not a more capable and smaller F-86?) under its belly but this concept was not refined and perfected so bomber pilots are often now on their own relying on a fragile stealth advantage if they are B-2s; the F-117s have already been retired.

During WW2, an U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) officer saw a German Me-109 on top of a small German assault glider and proposed we put a P-38 Lightning twin-engined fighter on top of the Hamilcar. An American C-54 or B-17 or B-24 4-engined plane tows the Hamilcar/Lightning into the air, then disconnects and flies back to base for another glider combo to take-off. From that point on the P-38's engines would keep the Hamilcar glider aloft all the way to the target since the power to take-off is drastically more than what's required to stay aloft! Physicists point out the same is true with our cars, you don't need 200 hp once you get to 60 mph, only a fraction of this power so driving around with a bug engine is inefficient. It gets better. Once over the target area, the P-38 pilot releases the Hamilcar to land with its light tank and troopers and the fighter-bomber is now free to strafe the ground of enemy ack-ack guns, troops, tanks, trucks etc. or shoot down enemy fighters! Such an arrangement would free up our glider tow planes and get ALL OF THE HAMILCARS WORKING DELIVERING COMBAT POWER TO HOLLAND would have worked wonders during Operation Market-Garden where German mortars needed continual silencing by fighter-bombers to relieve pressure on LTC Frost's men at Arnhem bridge. General Gavin says the lack of en masse airlift is what doomed Market-Garden.

This realization that the power to fly once take-off was achieved resulted in the Hamilcar X fitted with two engines from "obsolete" aircraft of its own. When fitted with the most powerful engines available the Hamilcar COULD FLY ITSELF ALL THE WAY TO THE OBJECTIVE WITH ITS FULL LOAD OF LIGHT TANK(S). Now this is a class/type of assault transport WE DO NOT FULL UNDERSTAND even today. This is a POWERED CRASHLANDING GLIDER. This is a minimalist aircraft that if it breaks up in a rough landing, OK. We can accept this because we want to land where the enemy is not expecting us. We are not putting millions of dollars into it, its made of wood. This is NOT the C-130s we have today that are not only heavier and cannot crash-land but need runways, handicapping us with having to seize an airfield or stretch of road.

Moreover, by mating a fighter-bomber or say an A-10 observation/attack plane to a glider like Keith Flint describes in his masterpiece book, Airborne Armor was considered for a P-38 and a Hamilcar glider carrying a light tank, a positive parasitic effect can be attained exploiting the glider's WINGS to carry enormous amounts of fuel; the power of the plane on top helps get the glider to the objective area and at the same time it provides fuel for the engines to create the necessary power. The attack glider's wings have now eliminated the need for fragile, vulnerable civilian airliner tankers doing an aerial ballet to transfer fuel and insured that fighting aircraft are embedded with the airborne force for self-protection against MIGs and provide fire support against enemies on the ground.

Creating an Attack-Glider Today: Start with a Box

The entire world moves by ISO shipping containers; even the U.S. military--it just hasn't realized how to fully exploit these sturdy metal containers into full combat advantage as BATTLEBOXes--yet. The Attack-Glider would begin as a kit to attach large wet wings to a standard 20-foot shipping container and either small bogie wheels or an ACLS to roll for take-offs and crash-landings. A detachable pedestal mount or mounts on top would mate a twin-engined USAF fighter-bomber like a soon-to-be-retired F-15 Eagle or a F-22 Lightning II or an up-engined A-10 Warthog to power the Attack-Glider. To tow the BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM into the air would be a surplus old 747 too fuel-hungry for efficient daily airline use and eventually with R&D JATO rockets.

A small squadron of 12 old 747s could easily launch with an hour a hundred BATTLEBOXattackglidersTM using multiple runways. Once airborne, the BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM could circle until others are launched to create a formation if anything more than a single-ship, special operation is required.

Then either a high or low-altitude release could be effected with the attack plane engaging the enemy or being on-call until fuel runs low and they have to fly back to a friendly base.

The BATTLEBOXattackglidersTM crash-land and out comes intact Airborne infantry squads each with a high-technology M113 Gavin light tank with 30mm autocannon, band tracks and electric drives to fan out and secure the assault landing zone for follow-on echelons of Paratroopers.





Those who fear their penis sizes will diminish if they train to land by glider will still remain as full-fledged Paratroopers because they will need to stay current with parachuting in case they have to bail-out from a stricken BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM that cannot finish its mission by crash-landing at the designated location.

If its a large Airborne Operation, the A-10 Warthogs could loiter overhead as on-call close/maneuver air support (C/MAS) assets and then use its STOL capabilities to airland on the airhead at a FAARP site which could simply by a BATTLEBOX which dispatches a M113 Gavin with a bulldozer blade to flatten out a landing strip and spray Rhino Snot soil sealant behind it. Once the A-10s are on the ground in the airhead, they can be refueled and rearmed by BATTLEBOXes containing fuel bladders with pumping hoses and those with 30mm cannon shell belts, 2.75" Hydra 70mm rockets etc.

BATTLEBOXattackgliderTMin the Context of Gavin's KIWI Pods

The BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM in concert with aircraft that can drop-off BATTLEBOXes like the proposed C-17 SkyCrane would fulfill LTG Gavin's vision of a KIWI pod Airborne Army that is always loaded and ready-to-fight. This would strengthen the Army-Air Force team so both would require eachother to do 3D maneuver warfare and guarantee large shares of the DoD budget.

Its also conceivable that the BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM system could be used by the USAF to self-deploy its short-ranged fighter-bombers to long ranges without need of mid-air refuel tankers and then upon releasing the glider-winged-BATTLEBOX have them fly by a pilot or unmanned guidance system to a collection point for recovery to conserve the taxpayer's monies. In essence, the BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM would be a winged, reusable "drop tank" for USAF fighter-bomber missions. So the USAF may not care enough about helping the Army out with the BATTLEBOXattackgliderTM system, they might be interested in it for their own Douhet agendas to make it a reality.

When Gavin is talking about a "cow pasture" powered plane he is talking about a plane that can CRASH LAND either on skis, skid-wheels or tracks or simply drops a KIWI pod that does the skidding to a halt. Yes, if the powered Hamilcar isn't wrecked it could take-off again and fly back to base, but when the pampered, doesn't-want-to-get-dirty U.S. Air Force heavyied up our own CG-20 glider to the point that it became a RUNWAY dependant airplane we lost the capability to land anywhere. Regulars in peacetime don't want to crash-land and pilots certainly don't want to be stranded and have to fight as ground troops if their powered glider can't take-off and get them back to base. What I'm saying is that the USAF's laziness and cowardice to not have to fight or get dirty has ruined our Airborne warfare capabilities because we now have to work around their planes that cannot and will not land anywhere. The USAF has also refused to field technologies that would enable extreme short take-off and landing (ESTOL) on their existing planes or to fund a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) assault transport because it helps the Army win wars by maneuver and they want to try to win wars by themselves using Douhet bombing.

The U.S. Army Airborne should adopt a Land-with-Power concept of operation. We should parachute drop M113 Gavin light tanks to carry paratroopers and some with large cannon assault guns and others bulldozer blades and Rhino Snot soil sealant trailers from existing USAF C-130s and C-17s so they need not have to land and we need not have to seize a runway. We then build the runway ourselves just as we were going to do as Flint points out in Holland using British flown Hamilcars to carry our bulldozers and airfield combat engineers. This force in light tanks is Gavin's Sky Cavalry and Grange's Air-Mech-Strike Force that has armor protection, superior cross-country mobility, firepower and vital supplies to not just "seize and hold" but can go to where the enemy is and collapse him, an American blitzkrieg. In the meantime, we should press the USAF to field a C-17 derivative that can drop 10 ISO container BATTLEBOXes from a few feet over the ground without complicated parachutes in one pass or at higher altitudes glider pods for stand-off coup de main assaults and to create a VTOL assault transport that can deliver one M113 Gavin and a 9-man squad anywhere in the world while being invisible to radar. The American airhead becomes a fortified BATTLEBOX operating base, dispersed, hardened and with self-sufficient solar/wind staying power requiring minimal resupply sorties of fossil fuel and food since it can collect its own water and shoot the enemy's ammunition.

Some troubling questions are raised in the book, if 863 x M22 Locust tanks were built, why were they not used by our own American Airborne? The USAAF asked for 144 Hamilcars to deliver light tanks and settled on 50 for D-Day. When we couldn't even get 50 Hamilcars, the Americans just gave up. We know the Hamilcar heavy glider production was sluggish, but why wasn't American firms asked to build some? Even if Locusts were not used, the Hamilcars could have enabled jeeps and 57mm or 75mm towed guns to be carried together, since we had to have one CG-4A Waco carry the jeep and other the towed gun and hope to combine them on the ground under enemy fire. If jeeps were lost, guess what? you were pushing your gun! Studying Gavin's Airborne Warfare , "Cavalry and I Don't Mean Horses", and War and Peace in the Space Age, you discover General Ridgway had to scrounge from another American unit just to get 57mm anti-tank guns. It doesn't look like the American Airborne had the clout to get Tetrarches, mass-produced Brens and even on our own Locust light tanks---let alone Hamilcar heavy gliders. When two forces bump into each other in meeting engagement, the side that has to stop and unhitch a gun from a jeep loses against the side with a gun mounted on a vehicle ready-to-fire. How many G.I.s died because of this is a big question.

Flint's other conclusion that at war's end that the British turned against light tanks stems again from his whiny tank dueler bias and is factually incorrect; the highly cross-country mobile and easily air-transported by C-130 Hercules turboprop and CH-47 Chinook helicopter 8-ton Scorpion/Scimitar light recce tanks were fielded and are in use today to provide "Airborne Armor"---so the concept has been embraced not rejected by the British Army. Are we surprising enemies in Afghanistan/Iraq with the noisy approach of these motor-driven aircraft? No. Do we need to drop farther away and use stealthy electrical powered light tanks with band tracks? Yes. Do we still need a STUG assault gun on a M113 Gavin or a Scorpion/Scimitar or BV206-BV10S chassis? Sure do. That's where Flint's book shines because it lays out the raw facts that enables us today to ditch the bath water and take the infant Airborne Armor to adulthood as visionaries like Tuchayevsky, Simpkin, Gavin, Grange, Zumbro and Jarnot have been calling on us to do to have an effective 3D maneuver "Cavalry" for years.

LAV-3/Strykerrs fail in Afghanistan; Canadians ditch their own wheeled trucks for more mobile and better armored tracks! Enter Leopards and M113 MTVL Gavins! 50 x 11-ton Canadian M113A3 Gavin "TLAVs" light tanks in Afghanistan with 42-ton Leopard C2 medium tanks in Combat English/Anglais

AR2007-A051-0261

15 May 2007

Kandahar, Afghanistan A Tracked LAV (TLAV) manoeuvres into position at Forward Operating Base Ghundi Gar. Having arrived as an escort for a resupply convoy the TLAV now takes up position as part of the Hotel Company Combat Team of the 2nd Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group, currently in this location as part of OP HADRIAN. 2 RCR BG is an integral element of the Joint Task Force Afghanistan. Joint Task Force Afghanistan (JTF-Afg) is Canada?s contribution to NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The focus of this mission is to help Afghans rebuild their lives, families, communities and nation. Canadian Forces personnel in Afghanistan are working to improve the quality of life of Afghans by providing a more secure environment in which Afghan society can recover from more than 25 years of conflict. Photo by: Sgt Craig Fiander, JTF ? Afg, Image Technician www.sfu.ca/casr/np-afghan-06.htm Armoured Vehicles - NATO/ISAF - Southern Afghanistan - December 2006 Punching at Panjwaii - Canadian Leopard Tanks in Combat CF Tracked Vehicles Tackle the Taliban and Afghan Winters Stephen Priestley , CASR Researcher / Illustrator ----------------------------------------------------------- In to Action - Canadian Leopard C2 tanks and the TLAV M113A3s in Combat After a month of settling in and training, the Leopard C2 tanks of B Squadron of Lord Strathcona's Horse (RC) are on the move. On 03 Dec 2006 (Afghan time) the tanks rolled out of the Kandahar Airfield compound heading for Panjwaii District. The Leopards form a new direct fire unit capable of punching through the thick, mud-brick walls (left) that typify much of Panjwaii District and caused Canadian troops problems during Operation Medusa. Images from Kandahar reveal details about the deployed Leopard C2s. As many as ten tanks are visible (right) all fitted with MEXAS armour kits - more than previously said to exist - and at least one Leopard each is fitted with a dozer blade (right, front vehicle) or with a mine rack (topmost image, front vehicle). The Leopard C2s aren't the only tracked armour in southern Afghanistan. The first Leo airlift included a Taurus Armoured Recovery Vehicle (ARV). There are also at least two AEV (Armoured Engineering Vehicle) Badgers joining the fight in Panjwaii (left). Both these specialist vehicles are based on a Leopard chassis. Light tracked vehicles also accompany the heavy armour. It had been announced that 40 rebuilt TLAVs would go to Kandahar in 2007. It seems some arrived early. Images of M113A3s in Afghanistan have been of poor quality so far. [1] The TLAV's rooftop remote-control armament has been covered - until revealed, we must assume that PWS (Protected Weapons Stations) have been mounted. M113A3s will act as infantry section carriers. The arrival of tracked LAVs is well-timed - winter rains are turning the Afghan dust into mud. The tracked vehicles address some of the mobility limitations that were encountered with LAV IIIs during Operation Medusa [2] which will be worsened by the winter conditions. More important is the Leo's greater firepower - within a day of arriving at Foward Operating Base Ma'sum Ghar, the Leopard's 105s were returning fire on Taliban rocket launcher positions. Journalists contrast upgraded Leopard fire control, sights, and protection with the cruder systems of the Soviet tanks defeated by Afghan Mujahideen in the '80s. Quite true but parallels can be drawn with Northern Alliance tanks (left) in 2001 - T-55s used as mobile, direct-fire artillery. A Leopard firing from its FOB revetment is simply more sophisticated kit doing the same job. The CF sees other roles for the Leopards in Afghanistan (among them protecting convoys from attack) but, in Part 2, we will focus on mouseholing mud-brick walls. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] 'Life-extended' TLAV (M113A3 and long-wheelbased MTVL) emphasized new armament arrangements - either RWS (Remote Weapon Systems) or 'One Metre' turrets (recycled from AVGP Grizzly section carriers). The former is probably the Rafael PWS as planned but may also be the Kongsberg M151 RWS (as on APVs). Another M113 type in theatre is the remote mine-clearing ILDS Protection Vehicle. [2] LAV IIIs had difficulties with Panjwaii mud-brick compounds and its irrigation ditches. Tracked M113A3s [without heavy caliber guns] will cope better with the latter but not with the former.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrATZkFUhaI The Dutch are using M113 Gavin tracks, too and are being VERY successful in counter-insurgency operations! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKa3tK3zi4c

What caused the turn-around?

COMBAT.

REALITY.

AFGHANISTAN.

A DESIRE TO WIN, NOT CONTINUE TO LOSE IN WHEELED TRUCKS...

EXPERIENCE ONE FAILURE DAY IN THE LIFE OF A FUBAR LAV-III/Strykerrr UNIT....

Strykers fail: VIDEO of Canadian LAV-IIIs hopelessly stuck in mud, breaks main bearing, mission aborted

American Stryker versions of the LAV-III are even more bloated and weighted down with bird cage and electronics inside....why are we wasting $4M on each of these flat-bottom, road-bound trucks?

From the recent PBS documentary, "Afghanistan: the Other War"

Go to 2:58 and see why the Canadians have gone to tracks in Afghanistan like other smart armies, Brits, Dutch etc.

Canadian LAV-IIIs hopelessly stuck in mud, breaks main bearing, mission aborted

We need to stop wasting billions on fatally flawed break-down-prone wheeled Stryker trucks that fail to get the job done and put our men into constant road/trail ambushes and put our money into M113 Gavin light for cross-country mobility but medium-weight in armor protection tracks that don't get stuck and break down in a mere light rain and minor mud.

STILL PHOTOS OF THE LAV-III DEBACLE IN AFGHANISTAN (AMERICANS EXPERIENCE THIS DAILY, TOO)

1: UHO. Its raining in Afghanistan. 20-ton wheeled trucks + muddy roads don't mix. Too bad wars don't take place where its comfortable and dry. 2: "We are going to make contact with a new village and reach out to them and win over their hearts and minds in our low-maintenance, all-terrain, high-speed SASO wheeled vehicles. Our LAV-IIIs are used by the Americans who call them 'Strykers'". 3: "WAHOO! Look at Me! I'm going 60 miles per hour on the road!!" (Not for long!) LAV-III stuck a 1st time; Road Speed: 0 MPH 4: "Ohhh....sh$%^&! I drove into a rut....." 5: "Can we get it out?" 6: "We had technical difficulties and had to cancel the mission to the village" 7: "What's that dangling underneath the LAV-III?" 8: "Oh No. Its the main bearing. Its broke, man. This thing won't run its trashed." 9: "What a Piece-of-Shit (POS)." 10: "Careful! Don't get the 'recovery' LAV-III stuck, too!" 11: "Oh Boy. The 'recovery' LAV-III is spinning in the mud, too." 12: "Please...please grip...grip....we don't want to be stuck here outside the wire when the sun goes down..." LAV-III stuck a 2d time and now with "company": THE TOW TRUCK IS STUCK, TOO! 13: "Gun it!!! Get through the dip!" 14: "Damn! We are Stuck Again! Dude! It's Getting Dark!" 15: "We Got to get Back to the FOB before the Taliban come out!" 16: "Go Easy! Easy! Let the Wheels Catch!" 17: "Damn. Forget it. Cut the Engine!" 18: "Mission Aborted! Maybe an officer will figure this out." "We REALLY showed our Afghan allies today why they should trust their very lives to us. Yeah, Right. We need to turn these pieces-of-shit in and get tracks so we can win"

Paul Hornback's Wheels vs. Tracks Article in the March-April 1998 issue of U.S. Army Armor magazine (before it became politicized) Warned Us Against the Wheeled SASO "Nation-Building" Racket EuroFad



1st TSG (A) EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wheels/Tracks NRMM Study

















































Steel Tracked M113 Gavin went 75+ mph in 1979! There's NO justification for wheeled trucks on the non-linear battlefield!

According to Hunnicutt Bradley: A History of American Fighting and Support Vehicles on page 109, the "Hot Rod" averaged 75.76 mph over a 500 foot gravel test track at Fort Knox in 1979. Power was 2 x 440 cubic inch Chrysler gas engines driving two modified 727 transmissions.

Imagine what M113 Gavins would do today on band tracks with hybrid-electric drive!

www.combatreform.org/bandtracks.htm

www.combatreform.org/hybridelectricdrive.htm

...thanks be to retired LTC Dave Tooker for finding these pictures!!

The Situational High Ground: Refusing Battle where the Enemy got there first Its 1863. Robert E Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia is on the march. For the first half of the American Civil War, the "Johnny Rebs" could out-march and out-fight the slow, cautious and conservative Union Army, taking the high ground first and waiting for them to charge blindly into their withering rifle fires. He is way up in Pennsylvania roaming about and the Union Army can't stop him. He is headed towards the general direction of the crossroads town of Gettysburg. Where is the Union Army? What is it doing? Does it know where Lee is? Union Cavalry General John Buford finds out. When Lee gets to Gettysburg, he has a rude awakening: Buford's blue cavalry on horses was already there holding the high ground, and he has no JEB Stuart gray cavalry to push them off because their impulsive leader was on wild patrols seeking some "action". Dispatching the word to General Meade to send everything he's got to Gettysburg since he found the Confederate Army---in a battle of hours, soon the entire Union Army held the high ground and could entrench---which combat engineer Lee of all people would know--would mean he would have to fight uphill while the "damned Yankees" poured kinetic energy (KE) aka bullets and low explosives (LE) aka artillery fire into them. Lee should have walked away and refused battle. He did not. Lee was more than anything else a southern military man full of "honor" and "pride"; vanities that no General commanding the lives of thousands of men should indulge. He decided he must attack the Union Army when they offered to do battle with him, even though the laws-of-physics deck-was-stacked against him lest his men think he was a "coward". He was a prisoner to his own vanity. After repeated charges and the loss of thousands upon thousands of men, Pickett's charge up Cemetery Ridge sealed the doom of the entire Confederate cause as from then on, they would never have the numbers to meet the swelling ranks of the industrialized Union Army in equal terms of either firepower or maneuver.

Had he REFUSED BATTLE and placed himself between the Union Army and Washington D.C., this would not have happened and Lee might have even taken our capital city and earned a negotiated war end with the south becoming its own nation-state, but his judgment was clouded by NARCISSISM.

The North under Lincoln's leadership finally got the message: take or create the situational high ground. Lincoln soon thereafter put non-vain, practical warfighters in charge who knew that the proud, narcissist Confederates would never refuse battle, so he obliged them with battle-after-battle by Grant in the Wilderness wearing them down, while maneuverist mastermind Sherman in the south flying in two mobile columns free of railroad supply dependence offered them two choices for battle---and he ignored whichever choice they made---to instead destroy their logistical means to fight.

The Civil War was won by no-non-sense operational maneuver and appreciation for the terrain but the history books are filled with romantic lusting over Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart and Lee's feel-good battlefield maneuvers and duels with the Union Army connected to no lasting political effects. They lost the war accordingly.

Most career military people are narcissists who want to be seen of men, gaining their peer approval to "self-validate" themselves. It was only after 3 years of military disasters before enough of them were fired in enough quantities to clear the way for Chamberlains, Grants and Shermans to rise to command to win the war.

Iraq is our Gettysburg

In 2003, the invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom; we got there "first" with the U.S. Army's tracked mechanized 3rd Infantry Division taking Baghdad but didn't exploit the situational like a Buford by immediately getting reinforcements by rehiring Iraqi Army Soldiers and government workers we promised jobs to. To pump up our egos, we instead moved into former dictator palaces and built forward operating bases (FOBs) around them, surrendering the roads/trails to the enemies we created by disenfranchisement and constant civilian house raids looking for Saddam Hussein and his loyalists. Hussein & company had escaped because uber-narcissist marines mostly in wheeled trucks who "pride" themselves that they don't fight mobile mounted warfare (which is for "weak pussies" so they say) didn't know what they were doing and were thus easily ambushed and stopped so they were 6 days late reaching their sector of Baghdad. Another failure was the unimaginative heavy tankers at CENTCOM who did not even make capturing Saddam a task on their to-do list and wimpy 173rd Paratroopers who sat & held as 1st Infantry Division troopers in M113 Gavins and a handful of M1 Abrams heavy and M2 Bradley medium tanks flown in one-C-17-load-at-a-time into the seized airfield in Northern Iraq who did not employ decisive 3D air-mech maneuver to "close the back door" from Baghdad to Saddam's home town in Tikrit. With Americans on a 9-to-5 routine in the FOBs like it was garrison and they were being sent out on lawn care missions: the rebels were then free since we neither looking or there on the ground 24/7/365 to stop them from laying roadside bombs and drive their car bombs into civilian areas to slaughter them.

Instead, we began doing Robert E. Lees: either daily "Pickett's Charges" down landmine filled roads in wheeled trucks or large sweeps that created more rebels than they found. The daily sight of burning Humvee /Stryker trucks does not inspire any confidence in the civilian populace that we can defend them nor strike any fear or "respect" in the minds of our enemies. Our willingness to die stupidly does not impress even those with their own nihilist death cult mentalities if its a result of our own INCOMPETENCE. Slapping armor onto Humvee s and buying expensive Canadian Stryker or V-hull shaped wheeled trucks to feed our narcissism does not work for long if at all and I have been warning everyone in DoD since my U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article in November 1989 about these road-bound, non-combat vehicles and explaining why on the non-linear battlefield all our troops must be in 28% more space/weight efficient than wheeled trucks, M113 Gavin-type light and heavier tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) so they can go cross-country at will in any direction to avoid landmines and other ambushes and be adequately armored to prevail when they must fight. The Israelis think we are nuts for patrolling Iraq in wheeled trucks instead of sound, well-armored tracks.

"Anti-Islamism" is Islam in another form in the opposite direction

Today's volunteer Army is permeated with narcissism in all the ranks at all the levels. We are the clones of the impatient and lazy Confederates who do not want to invest in the ground for lasting outcomes but want to be feel-good shooters doing Pickett's Charges as if war was some sort of group duel between mirror images for self-validation. Rather than REFUSE BATTLE in Iraq, we insist we must stay, doing daily "Gettysburgs" lest the Islamics see us as "weak", which is surrendering the initiative to the other side just like the Confederates did to the Union Army in our Civil War. War is NOT the ultimate test of manhood validation, it is a necessary evil and no more; to think otherwise in an American "Anti-Islamism" form is just another form of Islamist (hate attempted to be excused by religion) narcissism wrapped in red, white and blue. Call us the "American Taliban". We berate social conformists for being "weak" and "following the crowd", but those who are NON-conformist are just pretending to be different from the crowd because they are REACTING to and rebelling against what the crowd is doing--what drives them is what the crowd is doing not an internal, moral compass. America should not operate in a knee-jerk against whatever the Islamists are doing which would then empower its death cult mentality to be the thing that dictates who we are and what we are going to do lest we want them to own us as Grant/Sherman owned the Confederates in 1865.

In American football, the advent of the computer led Tom Landry to profile the tendencies of his opponents and prevail upon them until Bill Walsh and the 49ers decided to "jam the computer" and MARCH TO THE BEAT OF THEIR OWN DRUMMER and run scripted plays created at random that Landry's Dallas Cowboys couldn't anticipate. Walsh's adaptive 49ers owned the computerized Cowboys from then on and dominated football for 2 decades.

What America must do is stop replaying Robert E. Lee and refuse battle situations in Iraq or anywhere else where the enemy has got there first and holds the ground to decided advantage. Like Bill Walsh, we must start stacking-the-deck in our favor according to our moral and tactically sound playbook and stop worrying about whether the enemy will cower before us or "respect" us. We are not playing to their approval. Respect will come when its EARNED through VICTORY by fighting on our terms on ground of our own choosing, where we have first prepared it by combat engineering (blocking). You cannot "throw the ball" or "run it" without first "blocking" and "tackling" the enemy so you deny him the ground and instead control it yourself.

Take the Situational High Ground and Stop Charging into Ambushes

There are actually 4 "wars" going on in Iraq. 3 are sub-national conflicts and one is a nation-state war. In order of precedence:

1. Internal Civil War (Sunni vs Shia Islamic factions)

2. Rebellion to U.S. occupation

3. Iran vs. Iraq/U.S.

4. Militant Islam vs the West

To do an Union Army "Anaconda" strategy on this situation, we need to fully ANSWER each one of these "wars" with a grand strategy and tactically be pro-active Buford/Meades and Grant/Shermans not be re-active 1863-1865 Robert E. Lees and Picketts.

Option A: Block & Separate

To stop the civil war, we build a 20 foot high wall across the middle of Iraq and divide a generation of Sunnis/Shias from free movement to park car bombs or plant road land mines for a about 20-40 years. Make this generation cool off and get a civilian "life". We screwed them up and caused a civil war and the best we can hope for is to separate the combatants and hope the next generation will want something better. To pay for this, we cut the $1B/week U.S. occupation forces of 130, 000---most of which are doing nothing but consuming supplies---in half so $500M is freed for separation wall construction and our eyesore obnoxious presence causing rebellion is reduced. Those that remain "picket" (British term not in our playbook) only the main supply routes (MSRs) we need to sustain ourselves every 1, 000 meters by a string of forts made up of Soldiers in mobile but fortified ISO container BATTLEBOXes and M113A3 SuperGavin light tracked AFVs doing security creating maneuvers (SCMs) laying ambushes and waiting on the rebels to appear instead of vice-a-versa. Overhead, aerostat balloons and guard towers with ground surveillance radar in each picket fort and roaming manned 2-seat observation/attack planes scour the skies looking down below 24/7/365 to help the pickets deny the ground to enemy landmine layers and car bombers and monitor the oil pipelines. Like we need to do on our own SW border of the USA, we build a security sensor fence on the Syrian/Iranain border and use the proven French Morice line-type techniques of constant air/ground patrolling backed by tracker teams and quick reaction force (QRF) paratroopers in Mini-Gavins sized to fly inside C-130/C-27J transport planes and CH-47 heavy lift helicopters to hunt down and kill any intruders to keep Iran out of Iraq. This will also keep the militant Islamist Mufsidoon out of free live-fire demolition training at U.S. taxpayer's financial and offspring expense.

EXAMPLE: needs to be done all across Iraq

http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/iraq-war-violence/20070412050609990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Updated:2007-04-20 09:41:38 U.S. Walls Off Baghdad Neighborhood By THOMAS WAGNER

AP BAGHDAD (April 20) - U.S. Soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods in a Baghdad area "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said. When the wall is finished, the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, will be gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi Soldiers will be the only entries, the military said. "Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," said Capt. Scott McLearn, of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, which began the project April 10 and is working "almost nightly until the wall is complete," the statement said. It said the concrete wall, including barriers as tall as 12 feet, "is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence" in Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi forces have long erected cement barriers around marketplaces and coalition bases and outposts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities such as Ramadi in an effort to prevent attacks, including suicide car bombs. American forces also have constructed huge sand barriers around towns such as Tal Afar, an insurgent stronghold near the Syrian border. There has been little sign of the U.S. military using concrete barriers to divide Baghdad neighborhoods by sect, but at least one similar construction has been reported in the capital. Currently, the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq involves getting Iraqis to reconcile and support the democratically elected Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, and a security plan in the capital that calls for 28,000 additional American troops and thousands of Iraqi soldiers. U.S. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq, was quoted as saying Wednesday that he was unaware of any effort to build a wall dividing Shiite and Sunni enclaves in Baghdad and that such a tactic was not a policy of the Baghdad security plan. "We have no intent to build gated communities in Baghdad," Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper, quoted Caldwell as saying. "Our goal is to unify Baghdad, not subdivide it into separate (enclaves)." The Azamiyah barrier will allow authorities to screen people entering and leaving the area of northern Baghdad "while keeping death squads and militia groups out," the U.S. military statement said. Security in the three Shiite communities on the other side of the wall also will be stepped up, and the barrier is expected to make it harder for insurgents to plant roadside bombs in the area targeting coalition forces, the military said. The construction work by the U.S. military involves flatbed trucks carrying concrete barriers weighing 14,000 pounds. Operating under bright lights, the cranes lift the barriers into place while being protected by U.S. tanks. As work continued Friday, the day of worship in mostly Muslim Iraq, several Sunnis living in Azamiyah welcomed the effort to improve their security, but said the wall was another sign of the deep hostility between Sunnis and Shiites. "It is good from one hand to curb violence and have control of terrorists. But it's bad on the other hand to be separated from others. We should live in one area like brothers, not be separated from one another," said Bashar Abdul Latif, a 45-year-old teacher. "I don't think this wall will solve the city's serious security problems," said Ahmed Abdul-Sattar, 35, a government worker. "It will only increase the separation between our people, which has been made so much worse by the war." [EDITOR: do you want to stop being blown up or not? Sometimes people need to be separated so they STOP KILLING EACHOTHER. Maybe you want to continue to snuggle up to car bombs?]

Wall, YES, Humvee/foot patrols, NO

STOP patrolling on foot and in shoulder-high Humvee trucks and you'll stop having grenades tossed into them. We warned everyone years ago about this.

Instead of clamoring for a medal of honor for a dead hero they should be clamoring for M113 Gavin tracks and an end to aimless presence patrolling to keep living heroes alive. If they are sooo courageous surely they will be willing to fight the Army bureaucracy to get the tools they need to WIN?

Boo HOO! They are surrounded by a wall.

Now WHOEVER is inside hopefully can't pass OUT through a checkpoint with high explosives to kill Shias. That's half the problem solved.

Will the Shia Soldiers of the weak central government FACTIONOCRACY stop high explosives from passing IN to through the checkpoints to kill Sunnis? Maybe, probably not.

If not, GET OFF YOUR ASS AND CREATE A SUNNI SECURITY FORCE* TO CHECK CARS COMING IN to protect YOUR SIDE OF THE WALL.

Maliki wants his Shias to be able to freely kill Sunnis and the wall will put a damper on this; he's not listening to what the Sunni people want if a selected few or even if a majority are stupid and don't understand the military necessity of the wall to PROTECT THEM.

Damn, we are in agreement with Bing West on something.

* If you trust the Americans have them do the checks on the Sunni side until you get a Sunni RF/PF set-up. This is progress.

www.slate.com/id/2165036

The Great Wall of Indifference On patrol inside Baghdad's tensest neighborhood. By Bing West

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 Combat Outpost Fort Apache, Azamiyah. The news of late has focused upon this Sunni district in northeast Baghdad, where materials for a 12-foot-high concrete barrier have been positioned along a main avenue. Of the dozens of barriers across the city being laid down-principally by U.S. military and contractors-Azamiyah was the one that caught international attention when the residents complained the government was "imprisioning and punishing them for the acts of a few" by forcing all cars to pass through check points. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on a visit to Egypt, ordered the barrier halted, and the American ambassador agreed to comply. On the surface, the episode is a triumph for the press in bringing to international attention an "injustice", and for the prime minister in immediately responding and "standing up for the rights" of the Sunni minority. On the ground, the episode is less inspiring. Here at Fort Apache in Azamiyah, Charlie Company is on the eighth month of a 15-month tour in a combat outpost along the Tigris. (It was the setting for the 2005 documentary Gunner Palace.) Six of the first 110 Soldiers to patrol in Azamiyah, a stronghold for Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida operatives, have been killed. 1st Sgt. Kenneth J. Hendrix had been hoping Azamiyah would make headlines because of the valor of Spc. Ross McGinnis of Knox, Pa., who has been nominated for the Medal of Honor. On Dec. 4, while patrolling Azamiyah's narrow streets,a grenade was pitched into McGinnis' Humvee, and he fell on it, sacrificing his own life to save the lives of his fellow Soldiers. Patrols through trash-clogged streets, past shuttered shops and unemployed crowds of unsmiling young men, are the daily fare for Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 26th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. On April 22, while Maliki was ordering a halt to the barrier, four Humvees from Charlie were careening through the back streets a few blocks north of where the barrier was supposed to be erected. The walls along the alleyways nearly scraped the sides of the "armored" vehicles as they swerved around tight corners and gunned down straightaways. "We got hit here with two IEDs yesterday," Capt. Nathaniel Waggoner yelled to me. "The trigger men are outsiders. They don't give a damn what happens to the locals." The Humvees skidded to a stop beside some rundown shops, and Soldiers and a few Special Forces commandos piled out, pitching grey and purple smoke grenades into the empty, trash-strewn street. "A sniper got one of us in the leg yesterday," the captain warned. "Stay in the doorways." The Soldiers paused, eyeing a line of padlocked shops and checking their photo maps. An interpreter spoke quickly to a startled shopkeeper, who pointed at a shoe store and then disappeared into the smoke. They snapped a lock, rushed into the small store, and rifled through the receipt drawer and several boxes of shoes, looking for a list. With a broom, they poked each wall, listening for a hollow echo. In less than five minutes, they were back in their gun trucks, swerving wildly along a main street. We stopped in a middle-class neighborhood and knocked on a door at random. The patrols make about 15 such unplanned stops a day, in hopes of chancing on insurgents. The portly owner showed us in, and a few Soldiers went upstairs and returned with an AK-47 wrapped in white plastic covered with dirt. Waggoner looked at the weapon. "Sometimes we turn something up, like bomb-making material. We send to prison about 10 a month," Waggoner said. "This guy is probably OK." Waggoner asked why he had buried his rifle, since every house is allowed a weapon for self-defense. The man responded with a rambling story. "Uh-uh, no sale," Waggoner said. "Have the jundis [Iraqi army soldiers] been around here?" When the man nodded, Waggoner handed him back the rifle, shook hands, and left. "The Iraqi army around here control the police. They're Shiites, many from Sadr City," Waggoner explained on the drive back to the combat outpost. "They'll confiscate AKs. So the residents hide them. We get more info and cooperation when we're on our own." Back at Apache, Sgt. Robin Johnson, a squad leader who worked with the nearby Iraqi army battalion, explained the situation. "When we arrived, the residents were getting pushed back by JAM [the Shiite Jesh al Mahdi] militia from Sadr City. It's very sectarian here," Johnson said. "The Sunnis believe the police and half the army's cooperating with JAM. They get shot at more than we do. We've been here eight months. The residents are getting to know us. The al-Qaida guys go after us, but not the local Sunni militia." Estimates of Azamiyah's population range from 400,000 up to close to 1 million. The district is the strongest Sunni bastion in East Baghdad, with a distinct al-Qaida influence. The district council representative was murdered in December in a setup that involved Shiite officials. His killers were never found. Last month, the new representative was shot 18 times in broad daylight on Azamiyah's main street-by Sunni gunmen. Unemployment is more than 50 percent. A barrier would restrict both al-Qaida and the JAM, easing pressure on the people. But it's easy to persuade the residents to object to anything done by what they call "the Iranian government of Maliki." The prime minister's gesture at stopping the Azamiyah barrier indicated he isn't working closely with his own generals, who sit side by side with the American officers planning how to bring stability and reduce violence in every district in Baghdad. There was nothing secret about the barrier or the materials lining the street. The prime minister was out of touch. Worse, he was out of country. Last week, there was a horrific bombing in the parking lot of a central market in Rusafa, about one mile directly south of Azamiyah. More than 160 Iraqis were killed. Two days later, I accompanied Capt. Bo Dennis of the 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, and his squad to the scene of the carnage. Police at a checkpoint two blocks from the explosion warned us not to proceed because they were receiving sniper fire. We walked on to the parking lot-actually, an open square. It was a scene from Dante, a deep black hole in the macadam, burnt-out shells of cars strewn about, odd bits of clothing, sandals, and shoes. The tall, grey concrete apartment buildings in the background were gouged and pitted, all windows shattered. The cries of women and children echoed across the square. We were immediately surrounded by dozens of grief-stricken, angry men. They were shocked and bitter. They confronted us, shouting and pushing up. We expressed our sorrow and our own shock at the horror. The bitterness of the men was palpable. But they weren't angry at us. One after another, they screamed their impotent rage. "You Americans come here. You came," they shouted. "But where is our government? Why do they not come? Why? Who takes care of those women and children? All their men are dead. Where is our government?" No elected or appointed official in the United States would keep his job a day if he turned his back on such a stunning tragedy. And there was Prime Minister Maliki, in Egypt, condemning the Azamiyah barrier intended to reduce the killing and shield the innocents from the monsters who slaughter so ravenously. Bing West is the author of No True Glory: A Firsthand Account of the Battle for Fallujah. A marine combat veteran, he is on his 13th trip visiting with units in Iraq.

Option B: Redeploy & Watch

However, If the Sunnis/Shias are not willing to man the center separation wall to protect their own neighborhoods and the weak central government is too pro-Shia to keep the Iranians out at the border sensor fence, then we are indeed in a REL/Gettysburg like no-win situation and its time to pull out of most of Iraq and refuse battle on our many enemy's terms.

We can redeploy 50K troops to uninhabited southern Iraq as was suggested as a strategy all along (See Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq book by Trainor/Gordon), making it our enclave with QRFs to respond as needed to any crisis in the region and focus our military powers on the actual militant islamic sub-national groups residing in weak nation-state Afghanistan/Pakistan---but without participating in the Iraqi civil war nor fueling a rebellion against us. Certainly, there will be Islamist triumphalists name-calling us as having been "defeated" etc. etc. ad nauseum but this is a sucker's ploy to get us to be stupid and remain being their victims through our own vanity. If we resist the temptation to act like a weak ego adolescent and do what is sensible, they will soon see an American Army that actually adapts and fights smarter that does not operate on an ego emotional knee-jerk to what the rebels are doing and thus, cannot be led by the nose. The Shias will stop having us subsidize their "factionocracy" and have to adequately power share with the Sunnis or else suffer a generation of needless bloodshed. Iran will no longer be able to create trouble under the smokescreen of chaos in Iraq with our forces blocking them in.

Where are our competent technotactical leaders that take the Situational High Ground?

Flash back to 1863. Robert E. Lee was many things but he was not ready to resort to frontal assaults without at least first trying to "turn" the flank of his foe, he tried to get around the left end of the Union lines at a rocky hill called Little Round Top. Already waiting for him, was a college professor and self-taught tactician, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Along with him, were over 100 deserters who were being held on duty beyond their contract dates (like today's Soldiers/marines who are "stop-lossed"); and sure to die in bloody frontal assault upon bloody assault uphill against Johnny Reb positions because they always could get there first. They had a right to be angry for they were being mislead to their useless deaths or maimings by incompetent "lifer" narcissists.

But not this day.

No, not here.

No, not ever again in this war.

No, this time, we come to win.

Chamberlain was a LEADER OF MEN. He explained to them that the fate of the Union Army and our nation rested on their shoulders and that he and the 20th Maine had come down to this place to fight for them. That in the final analysis we were fighting not for vanity and snobby pretences of superiority over different classes of men or even the land itself, WE WERE FIGHTING FOR EACHOTHER. This time it would be different. We have the situational high ground and this fight was important and for "all the marble's". If it were not so, he would not be going there himself to lead the defense in person, not back at a FOB. And a few desperate hours later, after the smoke had cleared, it was his creative use of the playbook to launch a pivoting bayonet charge when his men had run out of ammo that defeated the Confederates in the nick of time to save the Union Army, that saved the United States of America.

However, today America's Army and marine's do not have Chamberlains, Grants and Shermans in charge of them with full playbooks and a willingness to take the situational high ground. They got elevated to general officer rank by playing it "safe" and "running the ball" even if the "blocking" was not there and the "ball" went nowhere or was even driven back. They take whatever the parameters are given to them by their superiors and don't speak up on the men's behalf to get a better hand---lest they displease them and not get promoted to keep their existentialist journey to "greatness" on track. They say "Yes, Sir!" and fu*k-it, drive-on (FIDO) knowing full well it is their men who are going to pay the ultimate price for FIDO and instead of getting the job done for America, results in a succession of an elegant, but superficially excusable failures. Under uber-narcissist "shooter" Army Chief of Staff General Schoomaker and successive riflemen "gun nut" marine corps faceless commandants, combat engineering has been diminished despite the fact that holding the ground is vital to defeating high explosive as well as kinetic energy bullet attacks. 4 years of explosive attacks by enemy defacto combat engineers has not significantly altered either Army or marine plans for more terrain-ignoring, heavy casualties by M16 vs AK47 foot narcissist gun battling gadget fantasy futures. A Combat Engineer cannot even rise to the top of either the U.S. Army or the marines because the light or heavy "shooters" wanting to do Pickett's Charges have stacked-the-careerist-deck against them and deny this entire MOST IMPORTANT aspect of land warfare from driving either vehicle or force design or the CONcepts or OPerationS (CONOPS) we employ--our "game plan" to use a football analogy--of how we fight wars. Without combat engineering being at least one of if not THE central driving force in our war plans we cannot gain the situational high ground. Its therefore no surprise at all that landmines blowing up our narcissistic shooters in wheeled trucks has come as a "surprise" to the infantry and armor officers perpetually running our Army/marines and they have tried to cover up their incompetence by calling these things a new BS buzzword "IEDs" when we have had landmines for centuries since discovering low and high explosives. What it will take to win modern non-linear wars where we cannot flood areas with a 100 divisions of ground troops like we had in WW2 by mass mobilization requires a full playbook and Chamberlains, Grants, and Shermans who are not narcissistic hot heads, who can stack-the-deck in our men's favor through personal example and insist that they be in winning situations (GIDO = Get It, then Drive On).

Its high time the American Congress realize that its ground maneuver forces are mislead and to inject the necessary reforms as a Lincoln did; starting with a DoD-wide HONOR CODE that rejects by name and definition NARCISSISM as a valid reason to be in military or any other public service, psychological screening of all persons wanting to be and actually are in uniform for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and not allowing them in or to stay in the service, a Haldane Board of alternative thinking military reformers advising Congress on all military budget plans and weaponry instead of rubber stamping whatever the military industrial congressional think tank complex (MICC-TT) ordains as the next "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) fantasy. A repudiation of the Tofflerian RMA mentality of mental gadgetization firepower as the guiding theme of America's way of war in favor of a sound, balanced view of the battle against the earth and man predicated on the principle that the epitome of warfighting is to make your enemy into your friend through maneuver and firepower to deny violence as a behavioral option. Next, we need to ditch the Key West Agreement and stop deceiving ourselves that the USAF is willing to operate slower armored fixed-wing observation/attack aircraft with back-seat observers that can actually spot the enemy to help the Army and marines do ground maneuver and at the same time fly fast, sexy jets to shoot down other jets or bomb civilians to try to win wars all by themselves. The USAF only wants to fly fast jets and its time we stop giving them centralized control over jobs they do not want to do. The Army should operate O/A and tactical transport aircraft that are best located with themselves not at long runway air bases miles and miles away where its thought to be safe. A Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC) should be formed that specializes in sub-national conflicts (SNCs) using M113 Gavin and M8 Buford/Thunderbolt light tanks, O/A planes and Morice Line type Combat Engineering means that get the short shrift in the Army/marine shooter's paradises. The NLB-SC should be commanded by a 4-star general who is a COMBAT ENGINEER and receive its funding directly from Congress. They can obtain, buy and operate ANY aircraft, ship (to include restoring one or two Iowa class heavily armored battleships to render fire support that really can land in all weather that hurts the enemy without making us go broke like dropping expensive guided munitions) or tank that they need to get the job done. The NLB-SC can handle SNCs bigger than what an Army SF Group can handle but no larger than an Iraq. After the nation-state war "shooters" take the situational high ground by regime change, they are sent home before they can start committing atrocities with their snobby outlooks. The NLB-SC takes over discreetly and quickly re-establishes civil government and secures borders, oil pipelines etc. without inciting a rebellion to its presence by seabasing and BATTLEBOX rural FOBs.

_______________________________________________________

* The author is an infantry officer not a combat engineer

Senior Military Officers are Another Country

"But you and we should say what we really think, and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that in the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must ....and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in their food opinion as you."

-- The Athenians, according to Thucydides

I recently had a telephone conversation with a friend over a project we are both working separately only to realize he's a senior military officer who is a "gatekeeper" for the status quo on nearly every other issue. As a non-linear thinker, I wanted to lay all options on the table and examine them at one time to look for possible arrangements to create a pattern for success (Get It, Drive On or "GIDO") but as I did this, I encountered a string of angry "you-can't do-thats" and "that's not the way it s dones" from him. He is clearly a linear, "FIDO" guy. FIDO stands for "Fuck It, Drive On" or take whatever the parameters you have been given, shut up, accept them and make do. I could understand FIDO in a lower ranking officer but when a senior officer with the authority and planning power to GIDO and "stack-the-deck" to get us a winning hand refuses to do so and has only a narrow set of FIDO options on the table, one starts having alarms going off. If a full bird colonel can't think, then who can and when does this happen? Or does it NEVER happen? When you think of being "inflexible" and "narrow-minded" this is the classic example; he has no flexibility because everything in the status quo with which we could possibly use in a new way has "sacred cow" status and a place where it fits in the joint puzzle that must not be deviated from because it would shatter the uneasy roles & missions "truce" in effect. DoD is at war with each other because since 1947 it has pitted firepower from the Air Force and Navy constantly at odds with maneuver from the Army/marines in attempts to win wars all by themselves to garner the glory and supreme budget share. My friend is inflexible because he is a "true blue" believer that the DoD structure is highly successful and this formula must not be deviated from. He then proceeded to lecture me that I needed to go learn the new DoD Joint Operational Concepts (JOCs) and see that its all "really sound" and "Clausewitzian". At this point, I decided not to attack this underlying, inherent, nation-states-can-only-do-organized-violence foolishness with the case that we actually need more eastern Sun Tzu style military thought to combat eastern sub-national conflict and nation-state enemies incorporating unusual small group techniques because I wanted to explore more of his thinking to get an "inside view" of the senior joint colonel. I bit my tongue a bit.

I decided to be honest though, and told him up front, that I don't see the need to learn this "joint language" since its obvious from common sense that its not working. He said Congress uses this jointspeak. I asked; "where did they learn it? Did someone use it to bamboozle them better?" He got even more angry at that point, and declared that them and their staffs learn it on their own by going to DoD web sites---which I find hard to believe with their busy schedules. Nevertheless, we continued with him railing on me to understand DoD's joint "doctrine" on their terms and to stop using my own common sense derived from observing the facts-on-the-ground or else I will continue to be persona non grata in DoD circles. I replied that I'm always willing to somewhat "play the game" better if it will help, but I will not lose my connection to reality to do it. However, he had an agenda beyond me just having better language skills to relate my reform ideas to DoD---he wanted me to somehow sans the facts all around us actually see the "success" that DoD's doctrine has created. I was aghast.

"Success? We are having our asses handed to us in Iraq" was my honest reply.

At this point, he was ready to answer such criticism with a ready-made answer, and in my case as a fellow but junior officer not on the inside or in power, he decided to play the "I've got-a-secret-you-don't-know-because-I'm-in-and-you-are-not" game. He asked: "do you even know what the actual JOC for OIF was?"

Fortunately, I knew the answer to this having studied the situation through friends who were involved in the Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) operations planning: "Regime change."

Check-mated, that I wasn't flatly ignorant, he then delved into the minutiae of the operations plan (OPLAN) knowing full well I wasn't a party to it; "We did exactly that, as we were told to do. We did exactly as we set out to do." A perfect FIDO response of air-tight circular reasoning, if there ever was one.

I replied not sarcastically---though tempted---but critically; "You mean regime change into chaos?"

He exploded and proclaimed; "That was DOS's fault."

I countered, "Au contraire. Mon frere. Gordon/Trainor say in Cobra II that DoD didn't trust DOS and decided it was going to handle reconstruction".

Status quo gatekeeper: "No, Phase IV and V of OPLAN was DOS's fault, Trainor/Gordon are wrong. Read the OPLAN" (ie; only we know the real facts and we will not let you read them, so stop criticizing; we didn't fail AKA argument-by-assertion doesn't need proofs from reality).

At this point, now I have conflicting information. Maybe that's all he can do at this point is to prop up the failed status quo is to create a shadow of doubt? A best-selling book by a retired marine general and New York Times reporter both privy to inside information and this older senior officer trying to keep a younger junior one "in-line" over the phone with statements that there really is a "Wizard of Oz" logic behind those "pulling the cords" behind the "curtains" in the "emerald city". Have faith. The great pumpkin will come. I decided to let this issue go and proceeded to the next glaring, obvious failure in Iraq. I stated;

"One of the reasons we failed is because we let Saddam & subordinates escape to start a rebellion against us".

He replied bitterly:

"No, we had a force cap, we didn't have the forces to clear everything out."

I said, "No, we had plenty of forces and I don't mean clearing out all rebels, I mean maneuvering forces into the north to block his escape. The 4th ID's equipment were sitting in cargo ships doing nothing. We could have taken some of those tankers (people) and flown them into the northern airfield the 173rd Airborne had taken to be a task force to take up a position between Tikrit and Baghdad to block Saddam's escape route."

In typical heavy tanker, anti-airborne strawman talk, he distorted what I said to fit into his pre-contrived prejudices. The facts are that a C-17 Globemaster III 4-engined turbofan jet transport can fly indefinitely with air refueling to any place in the world @ 500+ mph delivering loads as large as a 70-ton M1 heavy tank and America had at the time 120 x C-17s available. With a prejudice-created, heavy tanker mental block that justifiably hates the Airborne mentality which usually lies to itself that it doesn't need ANY tanks at all not even light ones, he like many others throws the baby out with the bath water and proceeded to create a can't-do construct by declaring that if we can't airlift his big brigades and battalions then this force option was not possible. If you can't do it his way, he cannot even conceive of it any other way. His reply was first to try to deflate my argument by finding some personal ignorance on my part of how big the 4th ID is even though I wasn't advocating flying the whole division in, just enough to block some thugs in pick-up trucks and SUVs from fleeing the capital city. He switched back into ad hominum mode: "How many M1s are in the 4th ID?" I replied;

"432." [EDITOR: number of M1s in all the armored battalions in a heavy division is 396, then you add the M1s in the cavalry troop.]

Failing in busting my grasp of the military wire diagram, he then "took off" into his anti-Airborne strawman by saying; "the ENTIRE 4th ID is too big to airlift into northern Iraq, it was not physically possible, so when the politics wouldn't let us go through Turkey we had did all we could, it wasn't our fault that we didn't get Saddam."

I didn't and don't buy into this and countered; "Yes it is our fault. We got Noriega in '89. We could have flown some M1 heavy tanks in to block Saddam's escape, I know this because Trainor/Gordon reports 10 x M1s were flown in by C-17s to the northern Iraq airfield to help Delta Force in vulnerable wheeled trucks hunt for mythical WMDs."

What I learned at this juncture in the exchange, is that senior officers don't know the basic facts of their military profession. If they don't grow up in the "Airborne mafia" they are not going to know what's possible by USAF or any other aircraft type to effect 3D maneuver. Ignorance can be initially accepted and then mitigated against by patient pleading of facts but when ignorance is EXCUSED AWAY AND SHIELDED BY A SMUG, PONTIFICATING, CONDESCENDING ATTITUDE ie; a closed mind eager to attack the honest messenger, it cannot be corrected. It doesn't want to be corrected. In this case, we have unimaginative senior military officers wanting to do only the bare bone minimums to get by using the FIDO set before them by the National Command Authorities (NCA) and even then to have built-in DoDspeak "wiggle room" to excuse away any failures. The facts are the 4th ID (M) is on its ass and should have continually trained for years before OIF to fly with USAF C-17s to generate 3D maneuver task forces so they didn't have to sit the war out when sealift couldn't get them there. They didn't have this ready, because of their heavy tanker prejudices are not interested in Airborne operations using the excuse; "Its not my job, man". The Army culture itself is driven by its own narrow-minded facts-of-the-situation ignorance and doesn't want anyone to leave their social place and role, either and doesn't challenge units like the 4th ID to "air-mech". That's why we wrote a whole book on the subject www.reocities.com/air_mech_strike/amsbook.htm but I don't walk around with a stack of $24 books to hand out whenever needed to hopefully effect instant technotactical epiphanies. A task force of the 1st ID from Germany did fly in slowly to the northern Iraq airfield at one or two C-17s at-a-time but failed to get off their asses to go block Saddam & company's escape routes. The cause of this timidity was the light Airborne mafia's refusal to permanently own M113 Gavin light tracks and parachute them in like the Russian Airborne does with its BMDs to effect operational maneuvers like blocking SUVs of fleeing dictators/loyalists trying to escape nation-state capital cities. Airborne lightfighters want to foot slog at 1 mph or ride around in sexy "rat patrol" trucks that cannot stand alone and block those determined to get through (too light) and the heavy tankers that can block want instead to play George S. Patton stampeding thousands of armored vehicles over favorable open terrain and not take any personal death risks flying in an airplane to get the situational high ground before the enemy can escape (too heavy) and there is no "middle option" for either of them lest they admit to shortcomings in their extreme mentalities. What we are talking about here is a CAVALRY that no longer exists in the heavy/light polarized U.S. Army and marines.

Check-mated by the facts, my senior officer fell back onto his last line of defense: hair-splitting the OIF OPLAN verbage, he screamed into his telephone mouthpiece:

"What was the mission????!!!"

He was saying getting Saddam was NOT on the list of things to do.

He was the strongman holding the violently opposed factions together, yet all we wanted to do is evict him from offices and palaces in Baghdad and we were not concerned if he would escape and roam about leading a rebellion?

This only makes sense if dark, sinister forces are the real driving forces in American foreign policy and they deliberately wanted Iraq to degenerate into chaos first against Americans refusing to get public works going, and then amongst themselves so as to bleed American stuck occupying Iraq indefinitely and harm it. The real duty of Senior officers is to oppose such no-win policies and come up with a GIDO CONOPS that can win privately and if this is blocked, resign publicly not FIDO along as accomplices to the defacto treason.

"Terminologate" or Die

Where do such senior Colonels come from?

The fact is we have thousands of colonels in the U.S. military with nothing to do because we don't have enough battalions for them to command. We are still operating under the post-WW2 construct of OPMS whose goal is to shuffle officers around to a lot of different jobs to hopefully give them a broad view of warfare and in the end make lots of Colonels into good generalists to be cadre for a WWIII mobilization and expansion into 100 divisions from the current 10. The result is we have thousands of colonels in a "holding pattern" waiting for the call to self-validation into general officer rank with nothing to do, so we make them go to joint schools and write joint "doctrine" ie; talk about talking about how we would do things if we could. And when we really do get a mission to do we are then saddled with all this rigmarole with which to wade through and by the time you are done you are no longer in touch with realities on the ground or have a cause/effect view of what can be done to create a successful outcome. We are so log-jammed with BS we now try to burn holes through red tape and jargon using mantras like "effects-based" operations when what we really need to do is fire most Colonels and reorganize the entire officer career path to one where horizontal excellence in tactical and practical real commands with UNIT ACHIEVEMENT as the goal like how it is in the British Army not vertical advancement up a "pyramid of ego" to individual general officer rank. Until then, our too-many-chiefs-not-enough-Indians, DoDwonks order you that you must buy into their fantasy world and its terminology and accept their built-in excuses that go along with their verbiage or else you will never see the "Wizard", much less be the "Wizard" (join the general officer's clubhouse).

My experience verbally clashing with the status quo gatekeeper did not overthrow the facts-on-the-ground that can be viewed with common sense. It did show, how that senior brass are by choice, out-of-touch-with-reality because they don't want the American citizen to be able to employ common sense and view military operations and expect RESULTS. They certainly don't want subordinates aware that they are naked emperors, they need these folks to fawn over them to provide narcissistic supply. By using mythical terminology so military practice is somehow made into an unknowable "black art" that only insiders know, they can insulate themselves from responsibility (CYA) to get positive results with America's blood and treasure. If you don't use their terminology and accept their built-in excuses they can play a verbal "gotya!" game of trying to bullshit you, that the facts-on-the-ground are not facts-on-the-ground and "you don't know what's really going on" because if you did you'd use the DoD language as if REALITY depends on their gobblegook to somehow exist. This explains why Humvee and Stryker trucks are constantly blown up and DoD sees no problem with continuing to use them. They are trapped in their own language, terminology and built-in failed ideas. Here's an important example;

You and I justly think and say with logical cause/effect without DoD institutional baggage;

A.) wheeled trucks can't leave roads/trails.

B.) Roads/trails are predictable paths wheeled trucks must take so the enemy easily lays landmines and waits for us to be blown up.

C.) this results in horrific American deaths and maimings and no civil populace security.

A + B = C. Outcome (C) is both immoral and incompetent.

The GIDO mind sees a "bad hand" is being "played" says let's stop using A + B; wheeled trucks that can't go cross-country at will with unpredictable paths and instead use widely available M113 Gavin light armored tracks that can;

notA + notB = notC = a DIFFERENT POSITIVE OUTCOME = right thing to do However, the DoD senior officer replies "Iraq is a SASO...its not appropriate to use tanks according to our joint doctrine."

Doctrine says this is a SASO = so you can only use wheeled trucks = FIDO = A + B = C (casualties) = We are doing the Best We can Do because we say so in our Doctrine

Doctrine = Doctrine

Doctrine says use trucks, so we use trucks because doctrine says so.

We are being consistent and doing no wrong: A = A.

SASO = Trucks and nothing else because DoD Doctrine says so

The DoD gatekeeper continues by stating; "IEDs are a new capability the enemy is using so we must come up with new capabilities of our own to defeat them".

SASO = Trucks = Enemy blowing us up = How dare the enemy go against our doctrine with these new gadgets? = We need new counter-gadgets to stop what the enemy is doing to us because there is nothing wrong with what we are doing

A + B enemy's new gadgets + our new counter-gadgets = we will not experience C says the DoDwonks

When you reply that he is a lying motherfucker and that landmines have been around for years, it becomes clear that the DoD status quo gatekeeper is trying desperately to maintain the bogus SASO "doctrine" to not use tanks at all costs, in this case the majority of the 3, 000+ dead and 10, 000 maimed in Iraq moist of whom were blown up by landmines while in road-bound wheeled trucks. DoD doctrine CANNOT BE EVER WRONG.

TRUTH

(A) trucks that can't leave roads/trails around for 100+ years +

(B) landmines around for 600+ years =

(C) casualties suffered by those fools who have not been studying their profession

=

U.S. Military internally focused on self-created war fantasies and "Doctrine" not even reading about the Israelis in Southern Lebanon who encountered road side bombs in the late 1990s which should have given them warning to make tangible changes in force structure and equipment

DoD 's joint language is a "secret squirrel" code to insulate themselves from any criticism which guards reputations and egos and budgets/power, and this explains why people like Sanchez, Abizaid, Petraeus and Mattis refuse to "get it" (look at reality generically sans the DoD lingo with common sense) and stop the "presence patrol"/"sweep & clear" shooter's mentality in Iraq because they have been brain-washed to be insulated from reality by DoDspeak and its built-in rule of the schoolyard that the U.S. military is "always triumphant" and "never fails" because its was wrong. "It always does exactly what it sets out to do as told to do by its civilian masters" (FIDO) and their DoDspeak always has built-in wiggle room that if events "go south", they can split verbal hairs and proclaim victory in their part and condemn their civilian masters as the sole culprits for sending them on the mission in the first place with "insufficient resources". Sounds like an alcoholic who can't give up the bottle, doesn't it?

Good Men who mean well? Says Who?

In closing, my friend said we are inherently wrong in all our web pages www.combatreform.org because we question senior officer's motives. He says I MUST accept the fact that they mean well and ONLY AFTER I LEARN AND ACCEPT THEIR WAY OF DOING BUSINESS can I be justified for condemning their minor shortcomings which are only then at worse case a result of good intentions and thus excusable in the final analysis.

They are above the law.

They are a law unto themselves.

"They write the doctrine that makes the whole DoD sing" (work smoothly and successfully) to paraphrase Lucifer (hint: he ain't working on the positive behalf of mankind) through Barry Manilow. He can take their DoDspeak and lying doctrinal BS and "go to hell" as far as we are concerned and that's actually where they are headed as a matter of fact.

I will say that my friend means well and this is an exception.

But is he good?

I'd say not.

At the core of his being is NARCISSISM.

An idea of smug superiority that says:

"I don't want the American civilian citizen questioning what I'm doing, in fact, I don't want my junior partners doing it either. If they want to rise to the top of this outfit, they better damn well buy into the rules of the schoolyard and use our terminology and our inherent escape clauses for excusing away military failures."

Its the basic weak ego of the military narcissist which is really at fault here because MIS TAKES are not a reflection that the person doing them is a piece of feces and a "failure". They are just what they are---a MISS TAKE. You missed, so try again. Find out how you missed and maybe next time you will hit? However, by propping up weak egos so they never have to admit to failure by internal self-delusional language, we deny the ability to admit and understand mistakes so we can change and adapt to be genuinely successful so there is no doubt in anyone's mind---friend or foe alike---that we have the victory. If we have to "spin" victory it ain't victory.

Not wanting to be "real" and genuine with the rest of mankind on a level playing field of the facts is by definition s