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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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.
What Dale writes is quite correct but it is just another manifestation of American ‘liberal’ media racism. When eighteen US Army Rangers dies that is horrifying because eighteen American lives are valuable. As Somali lives are irrelevent, who gives a damn if one thousand Somali irregulars got smoked? The important fact was that here was a chance to dwell on the negative aspects, namely American deaths. Regardless of the fact the US soldiers gave a fine account of themselves before being overwhelmed, why not just use this as an excuse to point out the US military are the bad guys yet again?
Whilst I do think the whole mission to Somalia was a noble but naive mistake from the outset, is it too much to expect the US media to realise it was actually a far from ignoble episode in US military history? I guess so.
Another example of US ‘liberal’ media racism was the reporting of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa. It as widely reported that twelve Americans died and almost as an afterthought, oh yes, about 300 or so Africans were killed plus nearly 4000 wounded. This need to be repeated again and again to people across the world who claim Al Qaeda only want to kill Americans.
Similarly as commented on by Opinionated Bastard (now is that a great name for a blog or what?), once it became clear most of the people on Flight 587 which crashed in Rockaway were not from the USA, media interest tailed off rapidly (no pun intended):
This is infuriating because the passengers on Flight 587 were almost entirely from the Dominican Republic. We get ’round the clock coverage of whatever civilian casualties may or may not have actually happened in Afghanistan, but when poor folks in our own hemisphere are suffering, it’s shuffled off to the back page.
I guess those people just did not count for much.
The negative reporting from services like CNN can be quite insidious at times. The following quote is a good example:
Atef is believed to be responsible for supervising the training of operatives. Prosecutors say he provided military training and assistance in 1993 to Somali tribes who violently opposed the United Nations’ intervention in Somalia’s civil unrest. In an October 1993 battle, Somali tribesmen killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers.
The statement is accurate. It is what is left unsaid that makes one wonder where they are coming from. The Somali “tribesmen” who surrounded the US Army squads took over 1000 casualties for their trouble. A nearly 50 to 1 casualty ratio. Doesn’t sound at all like the Somali lads won when you put it that way, now does it? In fact, I have a better description of the battle.
The Great Somali Turkey Shoot.
I recommend that everyone immediately read this item from the Fletcher Conference, Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. It is a brilliant piece in and of itself. On top of that it supplies text from several Special Forces dispatches. This is our first taste of the real story. And what a story it is.
From Wolfowitz’s words you will gain insight on what the war on the ground must be like. I cannot help but find myself liking and respecting these Northern Afghan people whose personality peaks through the dispatches. It is the stuff movies are made of. Our forces have not just been fighting side by side with the Afghans, they have been fighting side by side on horseback. Horses and sabers, tanks and satellites and batwinged black stealth bombers and lasers all mixed together like something out of a Space Opera. We are truly entering strange and interesting times.
Retief does not seem quite so fictional tonight.
According to Debka, the nightmare whose name I dared not speak may be upon us:
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources think it possible that the al Qaeda chief may have accumulated as many nuclear devices of unknown types as Saddam, with only a part of his nuclear stock kept in Afghanistan; some devices may even have been smuggled into the United States.
Earlier in the same article they imply that Saddam and bin Laden are co-operating on nuclear weapons. Now Debkafile is sometimes so far in front of the story they are off the planet, but they are correct often enough that I can not reject this story out of hand. Additionally, there is little here that doesn’t jive with my own hunches and my own expectations of behavior of the various players.
No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me what happened to the missing Russian tactical nuclear weapons described in a multi-page spread here in the UK some ten years ago. Taken altogether it is enough that I suggest US residents take SFC Red Thomas’ NBC survival advice [Words of Wisdom About Gas, Germs, and Nukes, Samizdata 2001-11-08] very seriously indeed.
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