We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The cast of characters at DOD briefings has been a great relief after years of mealy mouthed morons who went pale at the thought of admitting their job was to defend their country by letting the other side die for their country as quickly as possible. I had a particular chuckle over the following from the 11th December 2001 DOD News Briefing.
Q: Which was what? What was the desired effect?
Q: Can you describe to us anecdotally what the —
Myers: The desired effect was to kill al Qaeda.
Q: What sort of results are you aware of? What did your people on the ground see?
Myers: Dead al Qaeda. (Laughter.)
I wonder if they break into laughter as soon as they leave the press behind in the briefing room? Personally I’d be near pissing myself as soon as the door closed.
There is an interesting piece on the Afgha website about US and British Special Forces moving around Kandahar openly and the curious rather than hostile reaction of the local Pashtun population.
Here are some very interesting articles relating to Somalia and it’s ongoing experiment without any central government. First there is A Dying Dream by Joshua Holmes, followed by What’s Really Going On in Somalia by Jim Davidson
Also of interest is a Somali perspective of the military actions that resulted in 18 US deaths and many more Somali deaths in 1993. Not exactly what we had heard from the western media thought the numbers were about right. Jim Davidson is not some kook so do not be inclined to just reject this out of hand.
I’m nursing an oncoming cold and sitting back with a hot cuppa (coffee not tea) whilst I do a bit of hardcopy reading. I’m rather seriously hooked on aircraft in general and warbirds in particular so my sneezetime reading material is not surprisingly on that subject: FlyPast. It is one of two very fine UK magazines about the world wide warbird scene I read every month.
There is a particular relevance to current events in a series of articles written jointly by the crew of a WWII American B-24 Liberator. The narrative is taken from their collected diaries, scrapbooks and recollections. At one point they say their formation had a very good day and all hit their Magdeberg target with extreme accuracy:
The squadron’s bombs hit right on the MPI (Mean Point of Impact) with 95% within 1,000 feet (300 meters) and 100% within 2,000 feet. The crew could see explosions and flames shooting into the air. Smoke rose to about 8,000 feet and was visible for about 100 miles as the aircraft proceeded towards home.
A very good mission indeed. Now fast forward it to today and imagine the squeals of horror we’d be hearing if 219 bombers hit a target inside an historic city and 5% of their load hit between a thousand and two thousand feet away from the Taliban facility that was being targeted.
I’ve seen some improvement in reporting, perhaps because the news media has been getting thoroughly and justifiably battered during the last few months. They still have some learning to do. Perhaps the biggest story of the war is the wonder of the changes in military capability over the last 60 years. Changes that now allow us to specifically target and kill the SOB’s who done it without leveling an entire city around them. So what if we occasionally miss with one or two bombs? Big deal. “Dog bites man” or “Bomb misses target” is not news.
Now “Dogs don’t bite much anymore” and “Bombs don’t miss much anymore”… that’s news.
Now I know we said this before but this really is the last Samizdata article on the subject for a while… unless of course someone sends us an article which is pure genius and covers new ground. Patrick Phillips gets the last word
I thought I might offer my two-cents worth in the controversy concerning our armed forces in Afghanistan. The original post by Mr. de Havilland concerning the utility of the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy aircraft carriers was true as far as it went. But it also read like someone from the Navy frantically trying to justify the Navy/Marine Corps budget and force-structure. There’s nothing really wrong with that (and the USN/USMC certainly requires no justification to me), but the analysis provided was highly selective.
When it became obvious that Afghanistan needed to be targeted for the Taliban’s role in supporting the terrorists, we had precisely three things in our military arsenal that could be quickly mobilized to “reach out and touch” that distant, land-locked country. They were Special Forces (predominately Army), USAF heavy bombers, and the Navy’s carrier aircraft and cruise missiles.
We promptly used the available resources — and to impressively good effect. After only a few weeks of preparation time, the Special Forces were in-country conducting reconnaissance and contacting the locals, the USN had grabbed control of the air and performed cruise missile strikes, and the heavy bombers began working their own special magic on the local landscape. The results have been uniformly (pun intended) unpleasant for the Taliban.
As the conflict in Afghanistan moves into its (hopefully) last stages, the USMC is serving its role of providing an extremely competent, highly transportable combined-arms force that will provide more direct muscle than Special Forces can provide. So Marines have seized control of an airstrip that was previously raided/scouted by Army Rangers.
What point am I trying to make here?
Teamwork. We needed all of the capabilities discussed here.
At various times, every force I’ve mentioned above have been declared superfluous by various “experts”.
Heavy Bombers? Don’t need them — their job can be done with cruise missiles and by smaller fighter-bomber aircraft.
Special Forces and Rangers? They dangerously strip too much high quality manpower out of the Army’s regular units.
Cruise missiles? Expensive, ineffective, destabilizing in terms of arms control.
Marines and aircraft carriers? Well, that’s already been discussed.
So while I appreciate the point that the Mr. de Havilland was making, I do think it needed to be expanded upon.
Patrick Phillips
Samizdata will give Ed Collins the final word in the on-going knife fight pertaining to the roles of the US Army and USMC. Seconds away, round four!
Sirs,
I regret disputing with a former Marine, as I was once part of that illustrious organization, but the statements of Lt Col. Pastel are simply Marine Corps propaganda. I was a weapons platoon sergeant with the 82nd Airborne, an Army unit, in one of the battalions that invaded that island.
As I seem to recall, there was a Seal team that did indeed drown, by being put out too far offshore. This was about five men, not the fifty cited by Col. Pastel. Nor were there seven thousand Rangers, as he states. Two Ranger battalions made first contact with the Cubans by making a low-altitude junp onto the airfield at Pt. Salinas. One of them, I think 1st Bn, brought only their officers and NCO’s, leaving the ‘kids’ at home in Ft. Lewis, in the same spirit as Leonidas sending home his young from Thermopolaye. At most, there were a few hundred Rangers on the island at any time.
The Army eventually put five thousand people on the island, but these were brought in after combat operations were concluded and consisted of MP’s, medical personnel, etc.
The Marine battalion (6th MEU, I think) did nothing more than land at Pearl and drive around a bit. The center of action was always the air strip and the medical school at the south end of the island, in which the Marines took no part.
All due respect to the Marine Corps and Col. Pastel, but the Marines had little effect on Grenada.
Yours truly,
Ed Collins
I thought this was an interesting article in Government Executive Magaine (being a typical libertarian governmentophobe, this not my usual reading I must confess). It is essentially a US Army lamentation and paean to the USMC:
The fact that the Marine Corps was needed to extend into what most Army officers consider their service’s territory had some of them wondering where Army leaders were when the mission planning decisions were being made. “If this doesn’t raise questions about Army relevance then I don’t know what would,” said one infantry captain who says he is beginning to think he might feel more at home in the Marine Corps than in the Army.
and
“You’ve got to give the Marine Corps credit for trying to make themselves useful,” said Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for a New American Century and a former staffer on the House Armed Services Committee. “At least they’re making some attempt to respond to what the country needs to have done. The Army just seems to be spending most of its intellectual effort trying to find ways to stay out of it.”
Ah, I love the smell of inter-service rivalry in the morning. It smells of…victory.
With thanks to Graham V. for pointing the Samizdata at Government Executive Magaine.
My respects to Mr. Bainter, but he is overlooking the fact that air superiority includes knocking out air defense sites. This is not something bombers excel at: the shorter range fighters and attack planes are used for SEAD (suppression enemy air defense) missions.
It usually takes a combination of assets to win. For some operations, such as Grenada, all the necessary assets were contained within the Marines, but the other services insisted on playing too. So, we had 50 SEALS drown in rough seas and 7,000 Rangers shooting at each other across their horseshoe-shaped front lines while a Marine battalion took the island.
In Afganistan, as in Kuwait/Iraq, it is taking combined assets from all the services to manage the war effort effectively. I think that Mr. de Havilland’s point was that if the Navy/Marine Corps mix had been different, the Navy/Marine Corps team probably wouldn’t have been able to participate.
And it is seldom obvious to outsiders, but someone is always trying to reduce or do away with the Marine Corps. This has been true ever since WW II.
Chris Pastel
LTCOL USMCR (RET)
Eric L. Bainter takes a shot at starting an inter-service exchange of fire views
In referece to Perry de Havilland and his Samizdata post of 28 Nov entitled The USMC and Aircraft Carriers… don’t leave home without ’em , I can’t help but note the following:
- It is probably not terribly hard to establish air superiority over a handful of helicopters and some aged Antonov transports…
- Analysis of true cause-and-effect will take some time, but I note that it seems the things didn’t really seem to start breaking loose until the heavy bombers – i.e. the USAF – started hammering things.
- There might have been secret efforts at present unknown, but at least by press accounts, the Marines were largely out of the war until their recent arrival in the Kandahar neighborhood. Aside from the recovery of the downed helicopter, Army and Air Force special forces, and CIA types, seem to have been the primary ground forces that aided the Northern Alliance, set ambushes in the south, and guided the bombing strikes.
- During the transformation debate prior to this war(at least as recorded in the press), I don’t recall anyone really trying the eliminate either carriers or Marines, but there was consideration of how many carriers/marines/fighters/army divisions/everything else are required – and what is the best mix. The transformationalists (is that a word) were big on information fusion, UAVs, remote attacks, and all that – all of which have been successfully employed in this war so far.
So, I wish the best to the Marines (shoot, I’ve even informally recruited for them), and I hope they get their chance to clobber the terrorists, and I am glad the Navy had some carriers. But, I do not think the war in Afghanistan supports the general tone of Mr. de Havilland’s post, which I read as a blanket defense of the current Department of the Navy force structure.
Eric L. Bainter
Some interesting observations from the good folks as Fevered Rants regarding the prospect of unmanned aircraft being the wave of the future. Is the manned combat aircraft soon to be a thing of the past?
I agree that we will be seeing more and more of a role for UAVs but there are also some serious weaknesses in the theory that they will completely supplant manned fighters. Against the likes of Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan circa 2001, UAV’s have much to commend them. Yet sooner or later (probably later) the USA will have to fight an enemy who will have access to technology much closer in quality to that which is available to America itself…which means high quality sophisticated electronic warfare (EW). One of the realities of EW is that you can never be quite sure of what the enemy can do until he does it and it is a hell of a lot cheaper to jam the controls of a UAV than it is to fire a missile at one. However the only way to completely jam a manned aircraft is with a fast moving object (like a missile or cannon shell).
… don’t leave home without ’em.
For many years, some elements within the US military have argued that due to the range of modern jet fighters and the advent of in-flight refueling, the era of the aircraft carrier is over. The resources for these vasty expensive assets would be better spent on the USAF. Similarly the US Marine Corps is a force without a mission. Why bother with seaborne forces when Rangers etc. can be flown to a target from land bases?
Well, as we can see, it was the USN F-18 and F-14’s that gained air superiority over Afghanistan, not the USAF… and it is the USMC, which is part of the Navy, that has been airlifted off aircraft carriers and helicopter carriers into a land locked central Asian theatre of operations. This was in fact the longest range combat helicopter insertion in military history.
Hopefully this will once and for all put paid to the idea that either large aircraft carriers or the US Marine Corps are a waste of resources. For strategic, operational and tactical flexibility, with the ability to respond to unexpected threats in unexpected places, the USMC and the aircraft carrier are the perfect tools.
…to point out that the 18 US Rangers in Somalia gave a good account of themselves. All honour to them. The fact remains that the point of military action is not to get a favourable kill-ratio but to win. If I wanted to bore you with a list of wars where the losing side killed more than the winners I would start with World War II, go on to World War I, and keep talking for a long, long time.
Not that I’m arguing with the main thrust here! Here’s some more forgotten dead people: 5,000 killed by chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein in Halabja.
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