Sitting Ducks

We gotta take these bastards.  

Now we could do it with conventional weapons,

but that could take years and cost millions of lives.

 No, I think we have to go all out

I think that this situation absolutely 

requires a really futile and stupid gesture

 be done on somebody's part! 

--Animal House (1978)
___________________

USAToday argued this week that the expensive MRAPS (Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicles) have saved far fewer troop's lives than reported by the Pentagon -- perhaps 2,000 to the military's estimate of 40,000. The Pentagon stated that classified data was unavailable to the author of a Foreign Affairs study which gave the lower figure.

Rather than quibble over a few tens of thousands of lives, the question actually is: Why are our troops tooling around in these death traps at all?

An MRAP, contrary to popular belief, is NOT a combat vehicle; it is just a big truck, up-armored to resist blast damage.  The same is true of the Humvee which it replaced (which replaced the Jeep) -- these are troop-transport or mobility vehicles.  No one would expose either the Humvee or the MRAP to enemy direct fire weapons except in extreme circumstances, yet somehow they have become fixed in American minds much as the horse was for the mounted gunfighter.

The misconception probably began when the TOW anti-tank system was mounted on the Humvee.  This resulted from the MP Corps insistence that they could fight the RAP (Rear Area Protection) battles by killing tanks in the rear.  (Of course, no one explained how enemy tanks could get into the rear without the front either collapsing or contracting.)

This Corps scenario conventional thinking miraculously regenerated in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) when United States Forces deployed Humvees as road-cruising vehicle in threat environments.  The battlefield with clearly-defined boundaries was dismissed as a doctrinal concept, and vehicles were employed as they were never intended.  "Combat" became road-running and detonating Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), and hoping to escape the ensuing explosion with the minimum bomb damage.

The question not asked: How or why can armored trucks win an insurgency war?  Why are U.S. forces tasked with this basic support function of keeping the roads open?  Why doesn't the Host Nation secure its own borders?  Why are U.S. soldiers running a daily gauntlet?

The Pentagon has spent $45 billion on MRAPs since 2007, a price tag criticized recently in an article in Foreign Affairs, the magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations. The trucks do not perform significantly better than Humvees, the cheaper vehicle they replaced, according to the article's authors, who based their findings on Pentagon data.

Former Defense secretary Robert Gates said in a statement to USA TODAY that it was impossible for anybody, including the authors of the article, to determine how many lives had been saved by MRAPs (Tally of Lives Saved by MRAPs Lower).

The discussion over cost and effectiveness of MRAPs versus Humvees is a distraction from the essential question which is: What will troops so engaged accomplish?  

The insurgents -- who have now been re-tagged as "gunmen" in the media, neatly conflating their actions with every other gunslinger out there -- will adapt their tactics to neutralize the MRAP's capabilities, like moving their operations to rough terrain disallowing MRAPs from traversing the terrain.

The Pentagon disputed the article's findings, saying classified data unavailable to the article's authors prove the safety of the vehicles used in Afghanistan. In July 2009, Gates ordered more MRAPs to Afghanistan, including 5,200 of a new MRAP variant specifically designed for Afghanistan called the M-ATV.

Why offer MRAPs and M-ATVs to the Afghanis when they lack the logistical and mechanical capability to sustain the vehicle?  Why is this data classified?  Surely the enemy cannot use these statistics as a battlefield tool.

The U.S. has the best airlift capability, a plethora or support and supply and our weapons systems are the most sophisticated  ever seen on the battlefield.  But we will still lose, regardless of the superiority in materiel.  Money and sophistication will not trump the advantage of a people wearing shower shoes and toting AK-47s on Vespas.

It is their country, a fact that MRAPs nor any of its next generation can alter. 

I Spy

--High-tech British explosive, ca. 1942
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

I think the people have gotten dumber

Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D)

We can teach these barbarians a lesson

in Western methods and efficiency

that will put them to shame

--The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

___________________

Ranger will now be the fly in the punchbowl.

A recent cheery announcement says "Spy Planes Cut Roadside Bomb Deaths":

"Spy planes that capture images of insurgents carrying explosives from Pakistan and sensors that detect wires that trigger the bombs have helped to mitigate the No. 1 threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan -- roadside bombs -- over the past year.

"The Pentagon has filled the skies over Afghanistan with high-tech sensors, and the effect has been measurable. ..."

When bombers are using wires to detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs), this indicates a low level of sophistication. If they were using advanced techniques they would be using detonators WITHOUT wires. Further, this indicates the ISI is probably not supplying the bomb makers as we would see an elevated level of sophistication.

The U.S. is wasting precious time and money on sophisticated 21st century devices tracking pre-technological improvised explosive devices using cord, often not even worthy of the word "bomb". How smart -- or necessary -- is that?

The article describes insurgents stuck somewhere in a World War II movie, like Bridge On the River Kwai. Moreover, how is the denial of insurgent bomb makers in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan making us here in The Homeland any safer? When was the last roadside IED detonated here in the United States?

What exactly are the soldiers doing whom the drones are protecting in Afghanistan? The threat to Afghanistan by insurgents is not the same as the threat to the U.S. by radical Islamic terror groups like al-Qaeda.

Until we realize this glitch in our military raison d'etre, we will continue to roam the earth seeking wires in the sand.

Explosive Exit

--Lights by Lane Patterson

I believe that if we had and would
keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers
out of the business of these nations
so full of depressed, exploited people,
they will arrive at a solution of their own.
That they design and want.
That they fight and work for.
[Not one] crammed down their throats by Americans
--General David Monroe Shoup

Success is relative:
It is what we can make of the mess
we have made of things
--The Family Reunion, T. S. Eliot

Failed … like an old hanging bridge
--Marge Piercy
__________________

Ranger knows what he knows, and avoids writing about what he doesn't. Although not an expert, he has a good understanding of explosives and their use in terror and military applications.

His training as a Special Forces officer included military demolition techniques necessary in Unconventional Warfare - Guerrilla Warfare scenarios (UW/GW). This included things like blowing bridges, improvising and booby-trapping, exploding shells from 60 mm mortar to 8" artillery rounds as IED's and improvising incendiary devices. One-Zero school added specialized techniques to the suite.

Captain Zach Watson, Ranger's mentor, added Old School advanced techniques to the mix, like blowing engine blocks with with a 35 mm film canister of C-4 and PETN. The explosion was minimal but the hole created was so neat that it wouldn't cut a finger upon examination. SF was not flashy: It aimed for low-visibility success versus the activities of the terrorist, who aims for maximal press coverage.

Ranger had another mentor in the 1980's -- Ron Ball, a Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad expert known as "The Wizard". Ron used to travel on airplanes while habitually carrying ceramic detonators on his person just to demonstrate the absurdist and futile nature of airport security. That was the mid-80's (Ball was killed in 1986 along with Detective Arleigh McCree while attempting to defuse a pipe bomb in Hollywood.)

A simple Google search of "ceramic detonators" gives all the information a specialized bomb maker needs to make a significant device aimed at air traffic. Since we are 10 years into a phony war it is safe to assume that al Qaeda et. al. lack the sophistication to exploit this knowledge; if they could have, they would have.

Ranger also knows, for example, that the bridge in a recently-foiled Cleveland, Ohio, plot could not have been dropped by explosives alone. Several ear muff charges would have been required using large quantities of military-grade explosives properly placed high on the bridge and detonated at precisely the same time, which means that an advanced operative would have needed a lot of det cord to ensure the detonation. Perhaps they could have taken out an old covered bridge (surely an aesthetic crime) but not the Ohio 82 bridge. A lot of explosives alone does not = bridge destruction.

Like all the dupes and wannabes in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), they did not know the basics of destruction, to include testing your materiel. Having the intent does not necessarily result in a successful operation.

Further, would scenarios like these or that of the latest underwear (non) bomber ever have reached an execution phase without the presence of Federal agents or informants? These outside agents have often facilitated bringing these non-attacks to non-fruition. Absurd as they are, they fuel the imaginative fires of the true believers, who use them as examples of imagined even bigger and better destructive scenarios which they imagine Feds have staved off and which, for some reason, never did make it into the news cycle.

The argument is one from nothingness: If the little fish were caught, the bigger fish were caught two steps back in secrecy, and so we never hear about them. Mystery systems like religion and the National Security Administration (NSA, or "No Such Agency") allow for this belief on faith alone.

Operationally unsound plans are treated as though successes in the United States, where getting some Front Page qualifies one as winning. The story of two guys with ill-conceived explosive underwear wouldn't even provide the fodder for a lesser Tom Clancy intrigue.

We are not the Israelis and al Qaeda is not Black September. The U.S. has never seen a significant device here in the Homeland. We mistakenly combine these group's bomb-making expertise in-theatre as being relevant to our security here in the States; however, the two capabilities are mutually exclusive. Our security here in the States has no relevance to their abilities in theatre.

As a nation, the U.S. has lost its ability to be objective, rational and realistic. Until we get reality-oriented, we will spend billions to neutralize devices that can be best-described as jokes played on a fearful public being sold a bill of goods by an entrenched security conglomeration which sells fear as the only growth industry on our horizon.

At this point, please reach down and grab your balls and try to remember why they are there and what a man is supposed to do with them.

Overkill

--Fit for Active Service (1916-17),
George Grosz

Why are the Americans sending
mentally unfit people to war?
--Taliban press release

--They say that I am the lord of war,
but perhaps it is you.
--I believe it's "warlord."
-- Thank you, but I prefer it my way.
--Lord of War (2005)

For days and nights they battled
the Bantu to their knees
They killed to earn their living
and to help out the Congolese
--Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,
Warren Zevon
___________________

The most common propaganda statement from the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is that our soldiers are fighting for our freedoms. These freedoms presumably include the right of free press and the knowledge of what our troops are doing or not doing, in a general and non-sabotaging way.

After an extraordinary six-day blackout of public information by the Pentagon, Reuters and Fox News reported the name of the soldier who killed 16 civilians in Afghanistan, SSG Robert Bales.

After SSG Bales's identity was revealed on 16 March, various news outlets have tried to fill in the blanks regarding what happened. From Small Town Ohio to Afghanistan (18 Mar 12) was a good personal interest story on SSG Bales from the New York Times; Voice of America did another profile HERE and Army Times reports today that Bales's attorney says his client, now being held in Ft. Leavenworth, recalls little of shooting spree.

Bales had been diagnosed with "mild" Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and possible Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by Joint Base Lewis-McChord, "The most troubled base in the U.S. military" according to Stars and Stripes magazine. But Lewis-McChord has been accused in the past of downgrading and dismissing probable PTSD diagnoses in order to facilitate troops return to active duty. The Times also reports that during his deployments, Bales lost part of a foot

SSG Bales, 38, had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments, three in Iraq and the latest in the dangerous Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, long a hotbed of Taliban activity. The NYT reports the day before his killing rampage, Bales saw his buddy's leg blown off by a buried land mine. Bales' lawyer, John Henry Browne, said Bales considered his current posting “'grueling,' noting that the soldiers lived in metal cargo containers."

If SSG Bales had TBI, then why was he redeployed and carrying a combat MOS with rifle attached? Are we so desperate for deployable bodies that we send people into combat with psychological problems? More than the events of the early morning of 11 Mar, Ranger questions the chain or command that would send wounded personnel back into the breach, and that without proper oversight.

At the lowest level of leadership Ranger has always stressed the "buddy system" in which every soldier has a habitual partner with whom to team up. This might have prevented a scenario such as that of SSG Bales, but it presumes that the "buddies" are sane and sound, as well. The recent Marine pissing episode and the SS banner insignia suggest a negative leadership versus a negligent leadership environment.

A core question: Why are non-elite units tasked to provide support to Special Operations Forces (SOF)? Since the advent of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and their $6 Billion unclassified budget that also funds gray and black operations, this is a serious concern.

The entire purpose of JSOC/SOCOM is to create a separate command structure for shooters and support, so why are guys like SSG Bales thrown into the mix? This problem far outstrips the actions of Bales alone.

Why was the shooter not spotted before he committed his alleged activities? The Army is a culture of violence that is restrained only with soldierly values developed over the last 500 years, values which include a respect for life. The rules of war respect these strictures and guide soldiers both in their individual and institutional lives.

However, in recent years these soldierly values have been subsumed and subverted by a lizard-brained warrior concept anchored in behaviors of distant pasts. When we institutionally convert our soldiers into warriors, why are surprised when they act as such? Massacring 16 people was a warrior event, yet we hypocritically act surprised when it happens.

The military and a collusive press and citizenry can assume responsibility for SSG Bales's murders, since "going tribal" is what warriors do.

If our soldiers are warriors than our President is a warlord, and he should rescind his Nobel Peace Prize. (The arch Republicans should enjoy the analogizing of Obama to people like Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, whom the war crimes court at The Hague recently found found guilty of using child soldiers, a charge not too far off the mark.) Warrior kings do not wear peace medallions.

Everybody in the chain of command, from the President to the FNG (fucking new guy) to the PFC (Private First Class) is a part of this travesty.

Warriorhood is a losing concept unless one is a fascist or national socialist; the term did not work very well for them, anyway. Maybe we have adopted the term warrior as a kind of overkill, cover-up label, since the since the PWOT © is not aimed at military threats, after all.

Just call me an old soldier, since I never was and never would answer to the term, warrior.

Nine Inch Nails

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear --
kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor --
with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home
or some monstrous foreign power that was going
to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind
it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem
never to have happened,
seem never to have been quite real
--Douglas MacArthur

Terrorism is the best political weapon
for nothing drives people harder
than a fear of sudden death
--Adolf Hitler

A thing is not necessarily true
because a man dies for it
--The Portrait of Mr. W. H., Oscar Wilde
_________________

USA Today ran the requisite scare photo (later picked up by Military- and Navy Times) of a human skill with a 3-inch-long, threaded steel bolt lodged near the cerebrum, headlined: "Afghan Insurgents Jamming More Objects in Bombs". D'Oh.

"Insurgents are creating more destructive roadside bombs this year by packing them with nails, screws, bolts, metal coils, ball bearings and other materials, according to doctors treating wounded U.S. and coalition troops here.

"The number of casualties suffering multiple wounds from these objects has increased from about a dozen in March to around 100 each month this summer, according to Navy Capt. Michael Mullins, spokesman for the NATO hospital operated by the U.S. Navy outside Kandahar."

Truama specialist U.S. Air Force Maj. Randy Snoots, says the bombs "are getting bigger and bigger and more full of stuff." Of course, they're not quite as big as the stuff in the U.S. inventory, which includes 5,000 pound bunker busters, 155/8" artillery, cruise missiles (that have been employed against individual targets) and Predator missiles, to name a few.

Is this supposed to shock me? We were using IED's before IED's were cool. We were trained to use rocks if we couldn't get steel or scrap iron. While it is beyond regrettable that our soldiers are getting killed by these devices, they are not some space-age innovation, nor is packing them with even more stuff.

Bombs are emotional since they are viewed as indiscriminate and arbitrary. The soldiers who become targets have no ability to protect themselves, and this is fear-producing. While one may not know the exact place and time, it is a go that traveling up and down highways in hostile territory will eventually result in your finding and IED in a way you would have preferred to avoid.

Bombs in the hands of skilled bombers have military value and are a type of force multiplier. U.S. Special Forces soldiers are taught advanced bomb enhancement techniques that have included adding a White Phosphorous grenade to the front of a Claymore to enhance its lethality. In the Vietnam War, SF A-Camps employed 40-pound cratering charges as giant Claymores simply by putting rolls of new barbed or concertina wire in front of the explosive for an extra large fragmentary effect, adding to the blast effect. These were all IED's.

The North Vietnamese Army hung Chinese Claymores, artillery/mortar duds in trees to enhance lethality; the Irish Republican Army added nails to their explosive devices; the Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto used a bomb with metal fragments called the "Matzoh Ball", etc.

So what is newsworthy about the fact that the "insurgents" in Afghanistan are using "bigger and more full of stuff" historical devices to fight the U.S./NATO incursion? The real question is: How have the soldiers killed and wounded by these nail bombs decreased the threat of terrorism to Americans in the continental U.S.?

Further, if this is an insurgency, why are Americans being targeted? Is this insurgency against Americans, or against the Karzai government? Are the two separate entities? By definition, the insurgency must be against the Karzai government, and it is dubious that U.S. involvement is addressing the key issue which is the al-Qaeda threat against the Ole Homeland.

U.S. goals have become so muddled and convoluted that the entire theatre of operations has become a theatre of the absurd. Nail bombs will not build a nation, nor will U.S. involvement in an Afghan insurgency.

Lost

many soldiers eighteen years
drowned in mud, no more tears
surely a war no one can win
killing time about to begin
--Paschendale, Iron Maiden
___________

Last week Ranger viewed a special on Public Television featuring two fine young American soldiers suffering Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) resulting from IED attacks suffered while serving in Afghanistan. The piece focused on the collateral damage to the families of these once-vibrant young men.

The documentary opened with a voice-over regarding one soldier who had become paralyzed after his IED attack. The viewer is then told that following extensive rehabilitation, the soldier is now capable of movement, giving a feeling of hope. The camera now flashes to that young man in a wheelchair, being spoken to, vacantly staring ahead, trying to make meaning from the words being spoken to him by his father. He is not o.k.

The ramifications were heartbreaking, but that is a quality that can't be quantified; however, the financial cost can be evaluated. Private facilities charge $80,000/month to attempt to rehabilitate these men.

The cost to the Department of Veterans Affairs is $40,000 per month. Neither figures calculate the additional cost of benefits being paid to these men, who deserve nothing but the best.

The U.S. citizenry must ask: What in Afghanistan was worth the cost that is being borne by these injured young people, who number in the thousands? As a society, we fail to consider the future costs of caring for these injured shells of once proud soldiers.

Both men had Ranger and Marine flags and wore Ranger and USMC hats, which strikes Ranger in a contradictory manner. Here we are, viewing the the sad result that service ultimately entails, and this is the juxtaposed against showy pride in that sacrifice. This is fine and good, but Ranger wonders how many Rangers or Marines will ever visit these men once they return home from our far-flung, endless wars.

One would expect not often, since warriors are not known for their empathy.

We as a society are lost when we willingly accept -- and in fact, cheer on -- the slaughter and diminution of our young in wars that are questionable at best; criminal at worst. Which is worse: Having seen this on t.v., or having seen it in the wards of the 24th Evac Hospital in Long Binh, RVN?

It was just business as usual back then for a young Ranger. But to an old Ranger, the sorrow is devastating.