A Marine artillery battalion in Syria fired more rounds than any artillery battalion since Vietnam.

[A Canadian Cat]

3 minutes ago, IMHO said:

Can "no damage" side provide the numbers as well?

LOL there is no "no damage" side. You are the only person that seems to think someone said the US artillery caused no damage.

[IMHO]

53 minutes ago, IanL said:

LOL there is no "no damage" side. You are the only person that seems to think someone said the US artillery caused no damage.

***Deleted*** "No damage" were my words.

For me it's an interesting train of thought to have Marines themselves saying they rained unheard before amount of artillery fires on Raqqa yet to come to this conclusion...

On 2/12/2018 at 8:30 PM, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

It would be a mistake to attribute too much of the damage to US fires

 

Edited February 16, 2018 by IMHO

[c3k]

1 minute ago, IMHO said:

Nope, those are @c3k words I don't think he did actually implied zero damage - just a sticky name. For me it's an interesting train of thought to have Marines themselves saying they rained unheard before amount of artillery fires on Raqqa yet to come to this conclusion...

 

This is a lie. They are your words. I quoted your post. Keep it tight. Don't you dare ascribe that statement to me. Your smilie face does NOT equate to you taking credit for your own statement.

[IMHO]

9 minutes ago, c3k said:

This is a lie. They are your words. I quoted your post. Keep it tight. Don't you dare ascribe that statement to me. Your smilie face does NOT equate to you taking credit for your own statement.

Sorry, I rechecked - yes, I was the first to use the words. Sorry. Anyway I still believe it's a sticky name

[IMHO]

Just pictures

 

[MOS:96B2P]

3 hours ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

One of the more common tactics used by ISIS, and to a lesser extent before them, AQI is the "House Born IED" or "HBIED."  There's a variety of tactics involved with it:

A tactic preferred during Mosul/Raqqa type fights is to strongpoint a house into a fighting position (element size is usually team or squad, but sometimes up to platoon), and then equip that building with large scale explosive devices.  In urban operations, the attacker is usually obligated to clear hostile occupied structures (to make sure the folks within are really dead vs waiting for the lead elements to pass), so the structure serves the dual purpose of serving as a place to fight from, and killing enemy forces once the position is taken out/no longer tenable.  

What the US brings to the table is precision/semi-precision (or more like, guided, and highly accurate conventional fires) synced to intelligence gathering and surveillance tools well beyond what most countries are capable.  What this often works out to is hitting enemy VBIED concentrations while they're massing, firing on ISIS artillery assets, killing enemy supply elements (both the more conventional truck based, but also smuggler "ratlines") 

+1  Interesting post.  I've read about the house rigged to blow before but don't think I've heard it called an HBIED.  I think @Sgt.Squarehead has a way to create this HBIED in the editor .  And now I know the official name for it.  Also interesting to read about the intelligence collection and resulting action.  I'm working on one scenario where I refer to supply trails through the mountains as goat paths.  I think I may change the name to "ratlines" .   Thanks for another good post.    

 

[Kinophile]

@IMHO Re @panzersaurkrautwerfer 's comment - he can certainly defend himself, but I believe he was talking about Mosul, which was a very mixed party. So he was accurate in his statements. Youve taken those points and incorrectly applied them to Raqqah also.

Edited February 16, 2018 by kinophile

[IMHO]

8 minutes ago, kinophile said:

@IMHO Re @panzersaurkrautwerfer comment - he can certainly defend himself, but I believe he was talking about Mosul, which was a very mixed party. So he was accurate in his statements. Youve taken those points and incorrectly applied them to Raqqah also.

Edited February 16, 2018 by IMHO

[IMHO]

On 2/12/2018 at 8:30 PM, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

It would be a mistake to attribute too much of the damage to US fires... Both Mosul and Raqqa were subject to lots of dumb artillery and direct fire weapons from the non-US elements

@kinophile, a response in two posts (2 of 2)

Edited February 16, 2018 by IMHO

[Kinophile]

Aha, I do see. 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Sigh.

My contention is this:

We throw a wild party for Battlefront, and all of us are in attendance.  We all get positively rip-roaring drunk, do stupid things.  At the height of the party I'm demonstrating armor maneuver by going full sprint through the office swinging my arm wildly to indicate turret direction while screaming "Death before dismount." I certainly 100% do damage.

However it's hard to separate the next morning what specifically was damaged by my "Thunder Run" vs what other parties did too.  Sure there's my tanker boot treads all over the shattered remains of someone's desk...but I "ran" it over after someone else already kicked it down screaming "THIS IS SPACE LOBSTER COUNTRY!" I contributed my share to the massive pile of bottles yes....but I wasn't even the one who drank the most.

Within the context of both fights, US artillery and aviation certainly did destroy things.  This is a known variable.  However pointing to the rubble of Mosul and chittering how it was all those damned Americans and their bombs, or Raqqah and placing all the blame on 18 heavily abused 155 MM howitzers is a bit disingenuous.  

ISIS vigorously practices scorched earth type tactics.  Our "Friendly" and friendly forces all practice firepower warfare vs manuever (or they're going to shoot the objective with every weapon they have for an hour, THEN move to a closer firing position to repeat the same tactic, and then maybe five hours later, short on ammo move onto the objective).

Both of those cities felt the full weight of a 3rd World conventional military attack, a suicidal bomb happy defender, and then some Western precision fires.  Between those three, those fires certainly did their part in damaging those cities.  But again the contention that basically, without those fires the attacks would have left either of those cities pretty much intact is very much a falsehood.  Aleppo for instance serves as a really good example of what happens without the US precision fires, and with the opposition not being generally ISIS tier individuals.

So.  Again not denying there's collateral damage, but it's just idiotic to lay the preponderance of the damage at the feet of 18 howitzers while ignoring the effects of thousands of ground combatants, tanks, conventional artillery from both parties, IEDs in all guises all duking it out in close quarters.

[sburke]

3 minutes ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

Sigh.

My contention is this:

We throw a wild party for Battlefront, and all of us are in attendance.  We all get positively rip-roaring drunk, do stupid things.  At the height of the party I'm demonstrating armor maneuver by going full sprint through the office swinging my arm wildly to indicate turret direction while screaming "Death before dismount." I certainly 100% do damage.

However it's hard to separate the next morning what specifically was damaged by my "Thunder Run" vs what other parties did too.  Sure there's my tanker boot treads all over the shattered remains of someone's desk...but I "ran" it over after someone else already kicked it down screaming "THIS IS SPACE LOBSTER COUNTRY!" I contributed my share to the massive pile of bottles yes....but I wasn't even the one who drank the most.
 

I'm in!! When is this party planned for?  Love that visual dude, if I ever meet you I want to see you actually re enact it.

[IMHO]

1 hour ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

THIS IS SPACE LOBSTER COUNTRY!

Let's call it a day

[IICptMillerII]

@IMHO The main US artillery round is the 155mm. The Marines at that firebase wouldn’t have had another smaller round. There are still 105mm in service, but they are mostly with light units. Just like the primary rifle round is 5.56mm, the primary artillery round is 155mm. So to be clear, the Marines did not chose to use a bigger more “destructive” shell, it’s literalky their only option. 

8 hours ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

Sigh.

My contention is this:

We throw a wild party for Battlefront, and all of us are in attendance.  We all get positively rip-roaring drunk, do stupid things.  At the height of the party I'm demonstrating armor maneuver by going full sprint through the office swinging my arm wildly to indicate turret direction while screaming "Death before dismount." I certainly 100% do damage.

However it's hard to separate the next morning what specifically was damaged by my "Thunder Run" vs what other parties did too.  Sure there's my tanker boot treads all over the shattered remains of someone's desk...but I "ran" it over after someone else already kicked it down screaming "THIS IS SPACE LOBSTER COUNTRY!" I contributed my share to the massive pile of bottles yes....but I wasn't even the one who drank the most.

Within the context of both fights, US artillery and aviation certainly did destroy things.  This is a known variable.  However pointing to the rubble of Mosul and chittering how it was all those damned Americans and their bombs, or Raqqah and placing all the blame on 18 heavily abused 155 MM howitzers is a bit disingenuous.  

ISIS vigorously practices scorched earth type tactics.  Our "Friendly" and friendly forces all practice firepower warfare vs manuever (or they're going to shoot the objective with every weapon they have for an hour, THEN move to a closer firing position to repeat the same tactic, and then maybe five hours later, short on ammo move onto the objective).

Both of those cities felt the full weight of a 3rd World conventional military attack, a suicidal bomb happy defender, and then some Western precision fires.  Between those three, those fires certainly did their part in damaging those cities.  But again the contention that basically, without those fires the attacks would have left either of those cities pretty much intact is very much a falsehood.  Aleppo for instance serves as a really good example of what happens without the US precision fires, and with the opposition not being generally ISIS tier individuals.

So.  Again not denying there's collateral damage, but it's just idiotic to lay the preponderance of the damage at the feet of 18 howitzers while ignoring the effects of thousands of ground combatants, tanks, conventional artillery from both parties, IEDs in all guises all duking it out in close quarters.

Lmfao

Edited February 17, 2018 by IICptMillerII

[IMHO]

2 hours ago, IICptMillerII said:

the Marines did not chose to use a bigger more “destructive” shell, it’s literalky their only option. 

1.  I didn't mean to imply Marines are "bad" they did did heavy barrages of the city. I can compare it to the question of WWII Allied Strategic Bombing. Was it ugly? Yes, it was. Was it good that Allies did it? Yes it certainly was, since the alternative would be much worse. And in case of Raqqa and Mosul and ISIS it's much much much worse. Just for a reason unknown to me heavy barrages somehow equate with "bad thing" in current fade. To me - they are not, it least not automatically. I was arguing specifically against the limited point that US didn't cause much destructionю It wasn't to tacitly charge the argument with "good" vs. "bad" dimension since to me this case is firmly in the lands of good. I obviously somehow failed at not implying that 
2. Lower calibers wouldn't have done the trick. 105mm contains a little over 2kg of explosives, whereas 155mm - about 7kg. I remember a video interview with Idlib's military commander. He complained Idlib's militants negotiated to bring a tunnel boring machine to improve city defenses but Turkey didn't let it pass after Russia-Turkey deal. So I believe they must really dug deep in Raqqa/Mosul as well. And if they turned every other building in the city into a hardened position then only near total destruction was inevitable.

[Rinaldi]

What is the point of this exercise again, and why are you all humoring it? 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

5 hours ago, Rinaldi said:

What is the point of this exercise again, and why are you all humoring it? 

Mostly because I find this somewhat interesting in the wild/it's important to counter some narratives.  Basically we're dealing with one of those fun rhetoric games to try to level the "moral" playing field in that 18 howitzers shooting a whole lot somehow equates to more or less the rampant clusterbombing of residential blocks carried out by some folks that I'll just imply are actors here.  

I wouldn't call it "Whataboutism" because the point isn't to distract from the argument, as much as it is to narrow everything to the same gray-ish moral area in which it's really okay the Syrian government uses chemical weapons on civilians because it's like strategic bombing in World War Two, gotta kill them headchoppers amIrightguys?

As to the on topic, precision artillery has taken a fairly interesting role in that it provides the same sort of fires that used to be the domain of fixed wing or rotary wing assets, only with a persistence measured in ammunition stocks vs flight time.  This is sort of a big deal in that it open a whole new can of worms in terms of striking targets/makes the concealment/counter-recon element of the fight much more profound.  As it was, with only 18 guns tied into a fairly comprehensive sensor network it became very hard to go anywhere within the range of those guns without incurring great risk of artillery fire.

Into the future it will be intesting seeing this interact with EW/cyber assets that will make the ISR element a lot less durable, and certainly counter-battery will play a part.  Also as we increasingly see open architecture software and applications grow, it might be possible to see an insurgent group cobble together some manner of precision fires (in as far as digitally computing fire missions vs the "allah akbar?" we used to see). 

Of course seeing what the Russians did with similar applications against the Ukrainians also indicates this might become more of a conduit for doing bad things to bad people in addition to it's role as a red-enabler (And at that, opens some interesting ideas as far as employing applications nominally to "help" our brave patriotic whatevers that are actually enemy malware) 

[c3k]

20 minutes ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

Mostly because I find this somewhat interesting in the wild/it's important to counter some narratives.  Basically we're dealing with one of those fun rhetoric games to try to level the "moral" playing field in that 18 howitzers shooting a whole lot somehow equates to more or less the rampant clusterbombing of residential blocks carried out by some folks that I'll just imply are actors here.  

I wouldn't call it "Whataboutism" because the point isn't to distract from the argument, as much as it is to narrow everything to the same gray-ish moral area in which it's really okay the Syrian government uses chemical weapons on civilians because it's like strategic bombing in World War Two, gotta kill them headchoppers amIrightguys?

As to the on topic, precision artillery has taken a fairly interesting role in that it provides the same sort of fires that used to be the domain of fixed wing or rotary wing assets, only with a persistence measured in ammunition stocks vs flight time.  This is sort of a big deal in that it open a whole new can of worms in terms of striking targets/makes the concealment/counter-recon element of the fight much more profound.  As it was, with only 18 guns tied into a fairly comprehensive sensor network it became very hard to go anywhere within the range of those guns without incurring great risk of artillery fire.

Into the future it will be intesting seeing this interact with EW/cyber assets that will make the ISR element a lot less durable, and certainly counter-battery will play a part.  Also as we increasingly see open architecture software and applications grow, it might be possible to see an insurgent group cobble together some manner of precision fires (in as far as digitally computing fire missions vs the "allah akbar?" we used to see). 

Of course seeing what the Russians did with similar applications against the Ukrainians also indicates this might become more of a conduit for doing bad things to bad people in addition to it's role as a red-enabler (And at that, opens some interesting ideas as far as employing applications nominally to "help" our brave patriotic whatevers that are actually enemy malware) 

Well said.

[IMHO]

1 hour ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

Basically we're dealing with one of those fun rhetoric games to try to level the "moral" playing field

The new normal is no one cares anymore...

[A Canadian Cat]

8 hours ago, IMHO said:

The new normal is no one cares anymore...

Yeah, that is the goal but many people do care and are paying attention.

[IMHO]

8 hours ago, IanL said:

Yeah, that is the goal but many people do care and are paying attention.

I was referring to the policy of the US of A rather than the forum. There's nothing new as per the forum: "our guys" may annihilate residential blocks as they are there to instill right attitude into peoples' minds and "their guys" are just barbarians as they are "theirs" not "ours". Amen!

[A Canadian Cat]

25 minutes ago, IMHO said:

I was referring to the policy of the US of A rather than the forum. 

I know

25 minutes ago, IMHO said:

There'snothing new as per the forum: "our guys" may annihilate residential blocks as they are there to instill right attitude into peoples' minds and "their guys" are just barbarians as they are "theirs" not "ours". Amen!

That's not quite it though is it. I get that is the message you are told and the one you project here but that is not really the difference is it?

No side should be there shooting at residential buildings but there are bad choices and worse choices sometimes. How a country makes those choices and how in formed thier population is matters. I am are also aware that after some really bad choices early on the reality on the ground is way way worse now than it was or could have been.

I'll stop there so as to not get too political.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

From RT Arabic, but in my opinion it's a reasonably unpolished view of Aleppo after the fighting and a lot of clearing up:

The moral of this story being.....City fighting sucks, always has, always will.

There just is no easy way. 

[IMHO]

Our guys vs. their guy: quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”... But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and American interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent.  

 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

7 hours ago, IMHO said:

Our guys vs. their guy: quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”... But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and American interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent.  

 

FFS just quit.  This has nothing to do with anything in this thread except for positively D grade "Whataboutism"
 

On 2/18/2018 at 5:43 AM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

From RT Arabic, but in my opinion it's a reasonably unpolished view of Aleppo after the fighting and a lot of clearing up:

*snip*

The moral of this story being.....City fighting sucks, always has, always will.

There just is no easy way. 

Russia Today makes Fox News look like completely unbridled sober truth.  In terms of images presented, those sure are likely to be Aleppo, but the context needs way more verification before we give it too much credence.  

 

 

On 2/17/2018 at 11:06 AM, IMHO said:

The new normal is no one cares anymore...

It's actually getting back to the Russian infowar perspective (not "inforwars" mind).  Coming out of the Soviet experience, reporting falsehood/expecting resonance of Soviet world view  in settings with freedom of information failed and failed horribly because simply put anyone with half a brain, and a radio could see how incorrect the Soviet narrative was.

The Russian modification to Soviet active controls isn't to present an alternate, and frankly poor substitute for the truth it's to throw out as much garbage as possible so that the "Truth" is buried in a mix of signals designed to variously enrage or validate existing biases.  It's much easier to degrade information fidelity to the point where most observers reach "no one cares" state, or where we're simply equating the effects of 18 odd howtizers in action with supporting a country that's literally dropping sarin on civilian targets in the name of keeping a hereditary dictatorship in place.