Vanir Ausf B

Exactly. Like I said before, at this point it's a one-off. Anyone who pays attention to Afghanistan knows that attacks on NATO bases are not rare events. Successful attacks on NATO bases are rare events. Most of the time they do little more than kill an ANA gate guard or 2. Let's wait and see if this becomes a pattern before we decide the Taliban has recently grown longer fangs.

So CMBB had it right after all. Damn. I was looking forward to the East Front game.

No one explicitly, but I did notice your forum name is not Bigduchess6. Um, 9/11? Just a guess. Maybe because having removed the effective government they felt a sense of responsibility to replace it with something better? Or perhaps they worried that if they pulled out right away things would soon go right back to how they had been? Again, just a guess. I think they would know better than you. And I think we get that you don't believe anything NATO says that doesn't fit your narrative. But no one said ALL the green on blue incidents are motivated by personal grievances. I'm a bit unclear on exactly why you think we are failing. Is it because you think the task was impossible to begin with, or is it because the US/NATO forces are incompetent?

Germans, this is what you're really fighting for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji1mqP4gmxw

^^^ +1 Lol!

Well there are obviously some Taliban who are quite capable, albeit 15 fewer than last week. I would think they would be somewhat more prevalent among the Pakistani Taliban than the Afghan Taliban. Foreign jihadis are typically the hardest of the hardcore. Back when they were running the place and had something like a regular army the Taliban had a brigade of al-Qaeda trained foreigners that they used like Soviet NKVD. You are probably right. For now I think we should limit ourselves to posting obnoxious videos on Youtube. No hard feelings here either, but your man-crush on BD6 is putting a strain on our relationship.

Whoopsie!

Good point. I wonder if that will be modeled in the East Front game.

It's a one-off. By-in-large I don't think the Taliban has massively grown in capability recently. http://icasualties.org/oef/ByYear.aspx True. The bar for Taliban success is very low. They only need to avoid annihilation while inflicting a small but steady trickle of casualties to remind everyone they are still there. It does not take much skill to do that, just determination. And I grant that they do have it in spades. When you are rapidly growing an organization in a country where corruption is rampant and record keeping and even literacy is the exception rather than the rule sneaking in some bad apples is not hard, and probably is not even possible to prevent. Also, investigations have shown that many if not most of the green on blue incidents are perpetrated by individuals who are not affiliation with the Taliban, but who are instead motivated by personal grievances. I am on record as thinking this is not a good idea. But it is not true that we already did it. The number of troops we had in Afghanistan in 2001-2 was a small fraction of what are there now. IIRC at the time of the Battle of Tora Bora we only had about 5000 troops on the ground in the whole country. I am hardly a fan of the geniuses who were running the White House and Pentagon back then, but I think it could be reasonably argued that 9/11 created an imperative that could not be ignored. I'm here to help.

Please stop. BFC thinking that they had spoiled us (no matter how justified it may have been) is the reason we now have the games broken up into families, modules and packs. If you start telling them we are still spoiled I can imagine a grim future where every combat unit and scenario is sold separately for $1.99 apiece.

Presumably repairing holes in fences.

This is incorrect. The IS-2 featured the A-19 122 mm gun. This is correct. The IS-3 if anything had an even slower rate of fire due to it's extremely cramped turret.

Well, no, I don't. With regard to Afghanistan our reason for going in there was to take out al-Qaeda and push the Taliban out of power. We've had significant success with that. Our failures have mostly been in the nation building arena. I don't think we should ever have gotten into that. I blame mission creep as well as the strategic mistake of diverting resources to invade Iraq. I don't think arrogance has much to do with it. As for Iraq, there was certainly no shortage of arrogance among those who advocated that adventure*, but it was arrogance of a very different kind than you are mistakenly attributing to me. You see, they saw Iraq as a hearts-and-minds campaign, the very same type of strategy I have been poo-pooing in this thread. They thought we would be "greeted as liberators". Now to be fair, the initial invasion pretty much was a cakewalk. But we stuck around for the "transitional period" aka nation building, and got sucked unto the resulting civil war. Despite all of that we basically won the war. It was a Pyrrhic victory to be sure since what we got from it was nowhere near the cost in blood and treasure and whatnot, but we did in fact remove Saddam and replace him with a sometimes friendly government -- albeit not nearly as pliable as invasion advocates had hoped -- and we did basically crush the insurgency. The failure was in not solving the political issues that lay beneath the civil war, although that was something we really couldn't do for the Iraqis. Consequently, and predictably, things are going pear-shaped again now that we have left. *Does not include me. I was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, which I could prove with numerous examples if the General forum posts from that far back still existed. I did support going into Afghanistan, but there is no contradiction in that since the two wars were entered into for different reasons. I would like to think we have given BFC copious amounts of weapon performance data for their modern games. War is politics by different means, but it almost always involves some amount of killing and blowing stuff up. Pointing out that our military is really quite good at killing and blowing stuff up, and that hearts-and-minds campaigns don't play to that strength, isn't arrogance. It's just a statement of fact. Or do you disagree? I get the impression that you don't, but are for some reason annoyed that I said it anyways. I'm all in favor of ****ing for virginity. It weirds me out to read of your mental images of me. I don't think what I said glorified anything at all. It was a statement of historical fact. I don't think hubris had much to do with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It was probably more a combination of economic and demographic factors, combined with its unstable political structure. The late Empire was not expansionist, and was really more in a defensive posture militarily. Moreover, I think the case could be made that had it not been for their hubris, and their fierce patriotism, Rome would never have had an empire to begin with. Most of the Empire's territory was not ceded to it willingly. If BFC ever make such a game I would be honered to be your first PBEM opponent. Umm, probably not. I'm not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in China. I never advocated nuking anyone. Ever played Defcon? I hear it's fun. "Violent" and "xenophobic" are accurate descriptors of the Taliban. I am not xenophobic at all, but I won't hesitate to label the Taliban a bunch of ****bags. Because that's what they are. Do you disagree? Do you admire their misogynistic, medieval outlook on the world? Do you feel they are misunderstood? Do you view them as some sort of freedom fighters? I hope you had as much fun writing that post as i did replying to it. You are, after all, a pleasure beast

You're the only one talking nukes.

I don't know if talking about slapping them with our huge cock is much more fanciful than talking about the UN running the country for the next 40 years. But it is at least more entertaining.

LOL, really? I wouldn't have guessed. As I alluded to earlier, we signed those conventions of our own free will, not because we had to. And for the last time, there is a difference between could and should.

The Soviets absolutely did not go after the safe havens in Pakistan. It's very hard to defeat an insurgency that has safe havens. Drone strikes are ok for attrition but are not decisive on their own.

Whatever we wanted. The whole country, potentially. But we don't want it, and I completely agree that it's not worth it.

And we still conquered the Native Americans because we weren't trying to win their hearts and minds like we are in Afghanistan. Even the shock of the defeat at Little Big Horn, relatively far more significant than the attack on Camp Bastion, was a bump on the road. Eh, no. I'm talking about redefining victory from winning hearts and minds and building the country up to simply crushing all resistance by whatever means necessary. Villages that are sympathetic to the Taliban: annihilated. Safe havens in Pakistan: invaded and destroyed. Not saying we should, only that we could. The Romans had a process for putting down insurrections that they called vastatio, which translates to "devastation". As they marched they burnt crops and killed all the animals. Hostile settlements that capitulated were left untouched on condition that they supply hostages for the Romans to keep to unsure the town's continued good behavior. Settlements that resisted were wiped out. The process was continued until the rebels lost their will or ability to resist. It was quite effective.

... and we care if they come back, and get quite upset if they don't. I grok the reasons for the double standard. But it is a double standard we have imposed on ourselves rather than one imposed on us by an enemy. I give credit to the enemy for recognizing it and taking full advantage, but I also recognize that if we were a lot less morally conscious -- or if the outcome of the war were far more critical to our well-being than it actually is -- we could go Roman on their asses and win it in a year.

Oh I'm sure he's viewing things in a different way. I just happen to think it's a kinda ****ed up way to view things. Those 15 commandos were almost certainly hand-picked fighters who had a level of training that is uncommon among the Taliban. Yeah, you can make the argument that they still got good bang for their buck. But how often does that happen? Every dog has its day, and it seems like only a few times per year we see them kill more people at a time than you can count on one hand or blow up something expensive. I know. We also no longer allow ourselves to win wars by crushing the enemy with overwhelming force, which happens to be what our military is best at. That is very considerate of us, but it makes everything so much harder, and perversely also increases our own casualties.

I hate people like you.

And apparently wildly different than Bigduke6.

If they do that is good news, but that would mean it's been changed at some point from how it used to be.

You know what that leads to, right?