Devil Dogs bite far worse than bark

[purpheart23]

I can't respond to your entire post there Dietrich. I will ensure you however that carpet bombing while still used(however rarely) is somewhat a thing of the past. If you can put a B-1 on station to loiter over a target area for a given amount of time armed with thirty some odd j-dams, then yes, it is going to be very good for the coalition troops who have that kind of firepower on call. We all know that no weapon system is perfect.......I got it. But for some reason when a strategic bomber is brought up every body jumps to the conclusion that it's raining indiscriminate death down when in fact it is every bit as accurate as the smaller fighter bombers. Just my two cents. Nice post by the way Dietrich.

[Bigduke6]

Dietrich,

Just some odds and ends, we're not very far apart I think.

Is it not, in effect, necessary that a military force slant the truth in its favor just a little bit, both because the public wouldn't really understand the truth and/or might lose confidence in said military force as a result? In other words, even state-of-the-art democracies produce propaganda.

Sure. But the thing that makes the democracy work, well, one of the things, is that there are people out there ready and able to contradict the "experts," among them the free media. This improves the quality of the info stream available to the public, although of course both the media and the public have to put out some effort to make the system work.

Point is, statements from even a democratic country's military are risky to take at face value. Militaries are designed to kill and otherwise defeat the enemy - not get at the truth.

...(did some editing here...) Haditha...When you train a young man to be aggressive and to kill, give him an M16A4 and half a dozen grenades, then plunk him down in an area which is on the opposite side of the planet from his homeland and in which virtually any person not dressed like him is a potential insurgent who could open up with an AK or set off an IED, it's almost inevitable that incidents like what happened in Haditha will occur.

Well, that's how the soldier sees it. A person within the society the foreign soldier is deployed to, usually has a far better handle on who is safe and who is a threat - they after all understand the language etc. The problem is not so much that any one dressed differently from the soldier could be a threat, but rather, the soldier is ill equipped to distinguish safe from possibly unsafe among that foreign population.

Not the soldier's fault he's not a Middle Eastern studies grad student of course, but my point is the pressure on the soldiers is coming not from the overwhelming threat, statistically almost none of them get bombed, but rather their ignorance of the place and society they're placed in.

Have not military journalists traditionally been officers? I don't know the current term for it, but in the Second World War German Kriegsberichter (which basically means war correspondant, but they were military personnel) were typically junior officers, whereas US Army combat cameramen were generally NCOs or enlisted men.

Well, Second World War German war correspondence won few rewards for accurate and timely news reporting, and considering who was in charge of Germany it ain't no surprise.

These days, almost any one can be a military journalist, which is one of the reason why the reporting quality is all over the map. Historically, the best war correspondents are guys who know the troops and the country they come from very well, and can communicate to the civilians how things were with the troops. Ernie Pyle, Michael Herr, those sort of guys. The best writers tend to work for newspapers or themselves, and they aren't part of the military, if you are that really hurts your objectivity.

It just occurred to me to wonder: Was the designated marksman of this Marine platoon the only person the corporal interviewed about the event or simply the only person he quoted? Did this corporal just happen upon the aftermath of the battle, think "Hey, I'm curious about this", then question the first soldier who would give him the time of day? If I was a military journalist (for lack of a more accurate and official term), I wouldn't just look over the scene, interview one person, then go off and write an article about it. I would want to interview the platoon sergeant who (according to the article) "personally led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon fought house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy ambush site." What he did (insofar as the article can be believed) was, I reckon, rather more dangerous than what the quoted designated marksman did, despite said DM's claimed kill count.

You ask a great question. I don't know how many people the corporal interviewed for the story, but it looks to me like he talked to the sniper dude and got an intell dump from higher. Usually, when a reporter has two or more solid sources, he names them. Usually, when a reporter has crummy sources, he doesn't make clear how many sources he has and whom he talked to.

Plinking at bottles is one thing; popping out from cover just long enough to take actual aim and then shoot while bullets are flying all around is another. (Not that I've had much experience with either. =P)

It's taken as read that any given front-line infantryman is trained to hit his target out to, say, 200 meters (especially given the optics M4s and M16s are fitted with nowadays), but is not the value of even a sniper in typical tactical situations as much in suppressive capability (one guy gets hit, and all the others nearby dare not show themselves for fear of getting hit too) as in, say, scoring headshots?

Sure, if the opposition realized there's a sniper out there, and the sniper actually is scoring hits. Another reason I suspect this story is that a sniper scoring 20 kills in a single firefight is a real anomoly, that's not how firefights normally work, and it definately isn't how firefights involving Marines usually work. The Marine way is swamp with massive firepower, accurately aimed to be true, but mostly massive. Yet in this firefight if the account is to be believed this platoon marksman does something that, basically, is practically unheard of since repeating weapons became widespread in armies.

Now maybe over the eight hours this kid was just taking shots from time to time, if you assume he hit everything he aimed at then he was making a confirmed kill about every 20 minutes. That's incredible effectiveness, fantastic effectiveness, a Navy Cross performance.

And you just have to wonder how it is this brilliant achievement of US marksmanship, I mean, this is up there with Sergeant York, only hits the press via an obscure press release picked up only by Fox news and the rah rah troops blogs. Can it really be the USMC is so PR-inept as not to make this kid a hero in a NY minute?

I find that really hard to believe. If there is one thing I respect the USMC for more than their fighting ability, it is their skill in promoting their organization to the general public. It is inconceivable to me that a performance like that, if it happened, would remain obscure, the Quantico press machine would have that story on every regional newspaper front page in the country. Yet obscure it remains, and now a week and change after this amazing sniper performance, we are left scratching our heads as to what happened.

Which leads me to believe maybe there's something fishy with the press release.

[Dietrich]

Nice post by the way Dietrich.

Thank you.

carpet bombing while still used(however rarely) is somewhat a thing of the past. If you can put a B-1 on station to loiter over a target area for a given amount of time armed with thirty some odd j-dams, then yes, it is going to be very good for the coalition troops who have that kind of firepower on call. We all know that no weapon system is perfect.......I got it. But for some reason when a strategic bomber is brought up every body jumps to the conclusion that it's raining indiscriminate death down when in fact it is every bit as accurate as the smaller fighter bombers. Just my two cents.

But would said JDAMs would be dropped all at once, saturation-style? Would they not be dropped one at a time on specific targets? I was responding to Lee's assertion ("drop as many bombs on the bad guys as our men could possibly need"), which implies saturation-style bombing.

I call them militants or insurgents, terrorist is a different profession. For instance you have to only attack civilian targets to be a terrorist.

But that's only my definition since the word is effectivly redundent now, everyone is a terrorist in some way.

Er... yeah, terrorists and militants are different animals. Sometimes they are both, but one is not necessarily the other. One of the main reasons the US has had so many problems with both Iraq and Afghanistan is the people who were (and unfortunately to some extent still are) in charge were ignorant of differences like this. Actually, ignorant is an understatement for some of them (hopelessly naive, blindly ideological, etc. also fit some). There is a good reason why all the military theorists who are worth a damned caution about being ignorant of your enemy. It tends to make one come up with the wrong solutions for the situations at hand.

For those who don't understand the simplistic wisdom of using labels correctly, would you like to go into a doctor's office and have him say "you have cancer" and then when you ask which type have him say "it's cancer, what difference does it make what type it is?". Anybody that thinks that all cancer is the same shouldn't be practicing medicine, making public health policy decisions, in any position of relevance in an insurance company, etc. Labels do matter.

Language shapes thought.

Take it from me, a medical transcriptionist -- not only are there many different types of cancer, there are more than a dozen classification systems for cancer types. By way of a surface-scratching example, cancer comes in two overall flavors: malignant (potentially deadly) and benign (not deadly).

I used to figure that refering to armed and nominally organized people fighting against professional troops as "fighters" or "militants" was just another propagandistic thing a la "if we call them something other than 'soldiers' we can make the case that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them" or some such. Thanks to a bit of research, I now understand that, as Steve pointed out, to give your opponent any ol' label is to misidentify him.

I believe that of all the basics about a matter (Who, What, Why, When, How), the most important, the one that enables you to put together all the pieces formed by Who, What, etc., is Why. Determing (to the extent possible in a given instance) the Why of a matter enables you to have a full(er) understanding of the "whole" as well as of the "sum of the parts". Understanding why the enemy (in general and individually) does what he does -- for example, "Why are Islamic fundamentalists so quick and so violent in opposing 'the West'?" or "Why do women Islamic fundamentalists become suicide bombers?" -- is integral to combating him effectively. At least that's the conclusion which my research over the years has led me to.

[Battlefront.com]

Dietrich,

Language shapes thought.

Exactly. Look at the language Rumsfeld and other top Bush Admin officials used to describe the people attacking Coalition forces in 2004? "Dead enders", "Saddam loyalists", "foreign fighters", etc. When in fact the bulk of the attacks were coming from indigenous Iraqis who were fighting for a bunch of different reasons, few of which were related to loyalty to Saddam or Bin Ladin. Rumsfeld either didn't understand who the enemy was or chose to misrepresent them in order to deflect criticism that many of these people were attacking because of poor decisions made by US authorities. Personally, based on the evidence I think it was a combination of both. In either case, the language used was quickly proven to be factually inaccurate.

Take it from me, a medical transcriptionist -- not only are there many different types of cancer, there are more than a dozen classification systems for cancer types. By way of a surface-scratching example, cancer comes in two overall flavors: malignant (potentially deadly) and benign (not deadly).

Which is exactly why I chose cancer for a quick analogy I know that even within specific forms of cancer there can be many sub variants which, unfortunately, respond very differently to specific forms of treatment. Pick the wrong type and you get the wrong treatment, which in turn means the patient's chance of survival might go from decent to none at all.

I used to figure that refering to armed and nominally organized people fighting against professional troops as "fighters" or "militants" was just another propagandistic thing a la "if we call them something other than 'soldiers' we can make the case that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them" or some such. Thanks to a bit of research, I now understand that, as Steve pointed out, to give your opponent any ol' label is to misidentify him.

Yes. And it's made more complicated when there are multiple types of groups fighting in the same geographical area because the reasons they are fighting might be completely different. For example, some people might be fighting because they are unemployed and therefore a job will get them to stop attacking. However, that guy's neighbor is fighting because he fears a rival group getting into power and persecuting him. The guy next to him might not even be from that country and quite frankly doesn't care what happens to his neighbors as long as he's pursuing his own agenda. Etc. And that's just motivation... then you have to deal with the different tactics that come from each! Maddening.

I believe that of all the basics about a matter (Who, What, Why, When, How), the most important, the one that enables you to put together all the pieces formed by Who, What, etc., is Why. Determing (to the extent possible in a given instance) the Why of a matter enables you to have a full(er) understanding of the "whole" as well as of the "sum of the parts". Understanding why the enemy (in general and individually) does what he does -- for example, "Why are Islamic fundamentalists so quick and so violent in opposing 'the West'?" or "Why do women Islamic fundamentalists become suicide bombers?" -- is integral to combating him effectively. At least that's the conclusion which my research over the years has led me to.

The WHY is, indeed, the most important question to ask. Then you can start getting to HOW to defeat them. Unfortunately, for the first couple of years in Iraq and Afghanistan the policy was too focused on the HOW without really understanding the WHY (actually, low level soldiers/commanders often had a very good sense of WHY but were ignored or rotated out before they could affect positive change).

Steve

[purpheart23]

Oh ok, I see. Said JDAMS would be used for "plinking" targets. Sorry for the confusion. The saturation bit would be used for(pardon the expression) shock effect......maybe some awe.......but mostly shock.

[Dietrich]

the thing that makes the democracy work, well, one of the things, is that there are people out there ready and able to contradict the "experts," among them the free media. This improves the quality of the info stream available to the public, although of course both the media and the public have to put out some effort to make the system work.

Well said.

A close friend of mine always plays the devil's advocate vis-a-vis things I say about any and all matters military, as if he inherently knows more than me about said matters. The way I see, though, that can't possibly be the case, as he never researches anything, he merely has watched more History Channel and Military Channel than I ever have, whereas I not only actually search for information, I seek out multiple sources about the same battle or tactic or piece of equipment so as to have a more complete understanding thereof.

statements from even a democratic country's military are risky to take at face value. Militaries are designed to kill and otherwise defeat the enemy - not get at the truth.

And besides, the truth could easily be misunderstood by the average newspaper or blog reader, whereas a veteran or a military historian or someone who at least knows something about combat and about how a military force functions has a context for understanding.

"War is hell" is one of those quoted-almost-to-death lines, so often repeated as to be banal and thus strip it of the visceral warning it ought to convey. One key thing that people in general evidently fail to understand about the quote is its context. William Tecumseh Sherman's words actually were: "You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." He wrote this in a letter (dated September 12, 1864) to the City Council of Atlanta, which city was put to the torch on his orders. One can imagine Sherman thinking those words as he scowled at the sight of Atlanta burning. (Though he may well have ordered the city burned and then went purposefully on his way; I don't know the specifics.)

that's how the soldier sees it. A person within the society the foreign soldier is deployed to, usually has a far better handle on who is safe and who is a threat - they after all understand the language etc. The problem is not so much that any one dressed differently from the soldier could be a threat, but rather, the soldier is ill equipped to distinguish safe from possibly unsafe among that foreign population.

Not the soldier's fault he's not a Middle Eastern studies grad student of course, but my point is the pressure on the soldiers is coming not from the overwhelming threat, statistically almost none of them get bombed, but rather their ignorance of the place and society they're placed in.

Which point, I think, could be added to the list of factors which contribute to the grenading-civilians-in-their-own-homes thing as happened in Haditha.

Well, Second World War German war correspondence won few rewards for accurate and timely news reporting, and considering who was in charge of Germany it ain't no surprise.

True; but I didn't cite the Kriegsberichter as examples of accurate and timely reporting -- I meant merely to point out that they were generally officers rather than corporals.

You ask a great question. I don't know how many people the corporal interviewed for the story, but it looks to me like he talked to the sniper dude and got an intell dump from higher.

If I were a college teacher and a student of mine handed in a paper that had journalism of quality equivalent to Corporal Mercure's article, my response would be something like: "You cited one book and then cribbed the rest off Wikipedia?!" lol

Usually, when a reporter has two or more solid sources, he names them. Usually, when a reporter has crummy sources, he doesn't make clear how many sources he has and whom he talked to.

Reminds me of the Stephen-Ambrose-plagiarizes-in-multiple-books-which-all-become-bestsellers scandal a few years ago. Whoever thinks Stephen Ambrose is a great military historian ought to read John Keegan.

Sure, if the opposition realized there's a sniper out there, and the sniper actually is scoring hits. Another reason I suspect this story is that a sniper scoring 20 kills in a single firefight is a real anomoly, that's not how firefights normally work, and it definately isn't how firefights involving Marines usually work. The Marine way is swamp with massive firepower, accurately aimed to be true, but mostly massive. Yet in this firefight if the account is to be believed this platoon marksman does something that, basically, is practically unheard of since repeating weapons became widespread in armies.

Now maybe over the eight hours this kid was just taking shots from time to time, if you assume he hit everything he aimed at then he was making a confirmed kill about every 20 minutes. That's incredible effectiveness, fantastic effectiveness, a Navy Cross performance.

Honestly, 20 kills (at least the bulk of which the article claims were scored "during a critical point in the eight-hour battle") sounds more like a first-person shooter game (such as Call of Duty 4).

The thing that leaves me ultimately disatisfied with most any first-person shooter game I've ever played (though Crysis is a notable exception) is that no matter how immersively realistic the visuals are, no matter how accurate the weaponry is modeled (both in terms of looks and ballistics), and no matter how good the AI is, it 99 times out of 100 ends up seeming merely like a shooting gallery in which the targets shoot back: no enemy makes good use of cover, showing himself only as long as it takes to fire an aimed shot or squeeze of a brief suppressive burst. The enemies are always plentiful, they're always easy to spot (unless you happen to be facing away from one that scores at hit on you) . . . and they never surrender or are merely wounded.

Overall, FPS games actually mispresent the tactical realities of combat even while striving to be as realistic as reasonably possible.

Look at the language Rumsfeld and other top Bush Admin officials used to describe the people attacking Coalition forces in 2004? "Dead enders", "Saddam loyalists", "foreign fighters", etc. When in fact the bulk of the attacks were coming from indigenous Iraqis who were fighting for a bunch of different reasons, few of which were related to loyalty to Saddam or Bin Ladin. Rumsfeld either didn't understand who the enemy was or chose to misrepresent them in order to deflect criticism that many of these people were attacking because of poor decisions made by US authorities. Personally, based on the evidence I think it was a combination of both. In either case, the language used was quickly proven to be factually inaccurate.

it's made more complicated when there are multiple types of groups fighting in the same geographical area because the reasons they are fighting might be completely different. For example, some people might be fighting because they are unemployed and therefore a job will get them to stop attacking. However, that guy's neighbor is fighting because he fears a rival group getting into power and persecuting him. The guy next to him might not even be from that country and quite frankly doesn't care what happens to his neighbors as long as he's pursuing his own agenda. Etc. And that's just motivation... then you have to deal with the different tactics that come from each! Maddening.

A good example of that is, I think, eastern Europe/western Russia in WW2. Overall its the Germans versus the Soviets. But take out a magnifying glass, and suddenly you see tens of thousands of Ukranians volunteering to work for/fight alongside the Germans, Red Army troops surrendering by the hundreds and thousands (while in many instances a few as half a dozen men would fight to the death and consquently tie up an entire German company for hours or even days), then later you see partisans beheading Turkmen manual laborers who were working for the Germans, people of all sorts of ethnic groups volunteering for the once-racially-strict Waffen-SS . . . an at times mind-boggling complex of actions and motives.

The WHY is, indeed, the most important question to ask. Then you can start getting to HOW to defeat them. Unfortunately, for the first couple of years in Iraq and Afghanistan the policy was too focused on the HOW without really understanding the WHY (actually, low level soldiers/commanders often had a very good sense of WHY but were ignored or rotated out before they could affect positive change).

Many Westerners may well think Middle Eastern people innately uncivilized or even savage because many individuals there are willing to grab an AK or an RPG and attack Western troops. But wouldn't many (if not most) Americans attack -- viciously and ruthlessly -- troops of a foreign army which had invaded and was occupying the United States? Put yourself in the insurgent's shoes, and it ain't quite so baffling, if nothing else.

[Battlefront.com]

Dietrich,

Many Westerners may well think Middle Eastern people innately uncivilized or even savage because many individuals there are willing to grab an AK or an RPG and attack Western troops. But wouldn't many (if not most) Americans attack -- viciously and ruthlessly -- troops of a foreign army which had invaded and was occupying the United States? Put yourself in the insurgent's shoes, and it ain't quite so baffling, if nothing else.

Although the analogy has its weak points, overall it is correct. And you had better believe that too many Americans would be very happy to kill each other as well as the occupiers. The mark of a civilized nation is more about how well it keeps its citizens from killing each other without the use of force rather than how well it gets its citizens to love each other despite their differences. If the latter were the primary gauge of the success of a civilized nation state, the US would fare better than most but would certainly flunk badly! I live in an area that is about as homogenous as it can be within the US and I can name you a couple dozen people in my small town that would probably try to kill each other if the rule of law broke down. The fact that we have more guns per capita than most places on Earth would make a breakdown in law and order rather... well... "interesting"

Steve

[Dietrich]

Although the analogy has its weak points, overall it is correct. And you had better believe that too many Americans would be very happy to kill each other as well as the occupiers. The mark of a civilized nation is more about how well it keeps its citizens from killing each other without the use of force rather than how well it gets its citizens to love each other despite their differences. If the latter were the primary gauge of the success of a civilized nation state, the US would fare better than most but would certainly flunk badly! I live in an area that is about as homogenous as it can be within the US and I can name you a couple dozen people in my small town that would probably try to kill each other if the rule of law broke down. The fact that we have more guns per capita than most places on Earth would make a breakdown in law and order rather... well... "interesting"

I didn't mean that I think in a state-of-war situation Americans would forgo killing each other so as to band together and concentrate on attacking the invading forces; I just meant that there would be no shortage of people in the US ready, willing, and able to engage in guerilla warfare against foreign forces.

The typical American may well assume that anyone who willfuly combats Western forces in Iraq or Afghanistan (or anywhere else, for that matter) is 'just' a fanatical, bin-Laden-loving, Saddam-worshipping, "Allah hu akbar"-screaming Islamist, but if the US were invaded by foreign troops, Americans might well do not-dissimilar things themselves.

At the risk of using hyperbole . . . were a foreign army to invade the US, I reckon we would see guerilla warfare on at least as scale as there has ever been, and just as vicious.

There are a lot of gun-toting lawless people out there. Too bad so many of them call "the land of the free" their home.

If rule of law were to break down in the US . . . I would swim to Europe. =P

[Sergei]

This all sounds like the next module should be Red Dawn.

Then we'd have female partisans! Yippee!

[dima]

They are twins too!

[Flanker15]

Wolverine's!

[meade95]

Dietrich,

Exactly. Look at the language Rumsfeld and other top Bush Admin officials used to describe the people attacking Coalition forces in 2004? "Dead enders", "Saddam loyalists", "foreign fighters", etc. When in fact the bulk of the attacks were coming from indigenous Iraqis who were fighting for a bunch of different reasons, few of which were related to loyalty to Saddam or Bin Ladin. Rumsfeld either didn't understand who the enemy was or chose to misrepresent them in order to deflect criticism that many of these people were attacking because of poor decisions made by US authorities. Personally, based on the evidence I think it was a combination of both. In either case, the language used was quickly proven to be factually inaccurate.

Steve

Then again, that is exactly who was causing most of the troubles in Iraq - They most certainly were AQ (non-indigenous, AQ led elements - Virtually all of AQ/Iraq leadership has been non-Iraqis...and at the start many of their most loyal fighters were foreign fighters flowing into Iraq). Other fighting elements were "dead-enders". They were exactly that. Segments that were not about to accept a post-Saddam world. Coming from one in which they held large amounts of power and money and now no longer did (or were assured of doing for very much longer). They were hell bent, come hell or high water to cause as much problems in Post-Saddam Iraq as they could. Those leadership elements and mid-level elements were dead-enders. Dead was the only way to assure they were stopped.

Of course, developing our FID operations inside Iraq (and understanding the need when and where to use Iraqi police instead of IA) of bringing in the Sunni tribes and all the rest, made way for huge improvements.

But the fact is, it was AQ in Iraq that caused much of the death, much of the barbaric chaos. Of course there was JAM forces in the South, but that is another story. Another reality that was simply going to have to be dealt with. There was no magical button to push and make the task of seeing Iraq come out of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam go smoothly.

[Battlefront.com]

meade95,

Then again, that is exactly who was causing most of the troubles in Iraq

I don't think you'll find many people who have served in Iraq (military or as diplomats) would agree with you there. I think most will say that the single biggest threat, in 2003 and today, are the forces loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The Badr Brigade was also fiercely anti-Saddam. These was supposed to be the easy allies of the Coalition since they were oppressed and exiled under Saddam. Yet they are the primary reasons why the country has been in bloody chaos since the Saddam fell.

AQ only made things worse by deliberately provoking internal strife between Sunni and Shia. And in the case of the Sunni insurgency, it has more to do with tribal issues and fear of the Shia than it did any allegiance to AQ. They worked with AQ when it suited them, turned on them when it didn't.

But the fact is, it was AQ in Iraq that caused much of the death, much of the barbaric chaos. Of course there was JAM forces in the South, but that is another story. Another reality that was simply going to have to be dealt with. There was no magical button to push and make the task of seeing Iraq come out of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam go smoothly.

AQ was a part of it for sure, but without them I don't think Iraq would have been significantly less chaotic over the past 5 years. The existing problems were there long before Saddam was booted. To think they would have been sitting there singing an Islamic form of Kumbayha if AQ and Saddam loyalists weren't stirring the pot is the sort of naive notion that got us into this mess in the first place. You don't seem to be saying that, therefore it appears that we are not in disagreement.

Presently I don't think there is anybody with any credibility that thinks the initial planning and execution of toppling Saddam was mostly incompetently handled policies based on woefully naive expectations and an utter lack of understanding about the realities on the ground. As you say, there was no magic button to push to make things go right. However, that was exactly what the early people in charge of governing Iraq thought existed.

Steve

[John Kettler]

Dietrich,

In no particular order...The Vatican recently formally disestablished the position of Devil's Advocate, making it much easier to declare someone a saint. There is a world of difference between a single B-1B cruising over, say, Iraq while loaded with JDAM and hundreds of four-engine and twin-engine heavy and medium bombers carpet bombing in WW II. While that string of JDAM can indeed be deployed against closely spaced discreet targets in such a way as to somewhat resemble the former, the actual difference is comparable to the difference between using a lance thrust through the visor as opposed to beating a knight to death with mauls.

The horrific casualties at COBRA and similar were the result of whole bomber formations unloading many tons of bombs on dense formations of men, armor and equipment poised to jump off. While I agree that having a 1000 lb. JDAM drop in for an unexpected visit would be very bad, it would be bad for a relative handful when compared to what happened at COBRA.

The notion of using a B-1B for CAS blew my mind when I first read of it, and I worked on B-1B conventional attack studies at Rockwell, but it makes perfect sense when you look at it in terms of survivability, payload, time to target and sheer combat persistence. Operating from altitudes well above any MANPADS, carrying a war load even a bunch of A-10s couldn't touch, able to stay available for huge blocks of time and reach any threatened point in the country in minutes, a single B-1B can do what hundreds of WW II bombers couldn't and do it with blinding accuracy. Were I on the ground and in a jam, I'd be thrilled to have such an option available. Could something go wrong? Yes! Is it likely to, as compared to the COBRA case, no. For starters, the JDAM needs nothing more than target coordinates. Neither it, nor the aircrew, is affected by battlefield obscuration, weather, etc. Contrast that with COBRA, where marker panels went unseen, landmarks were hidden by billows of dust, trailing bombers "bombed on the leader," causing the rear edge of the bombed zone to effectively walk backwards onto the assembled Allied forces. A single B-17 carried the explosive payload of 5 JDAM. IOW, if something DID go wrong in the B-1B CAS scenario, the odds are the casualties would be minuscule by COBRA standards, however huge by modern sensibilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cobra

A better comparison would be a Vietnam era ARC LIGHT strike from a 3 B-52 cell, resulting in a beaten zone of 1/2 mile wide by 1.5 miles long. THAT would pucker me plenty, but the U.S. used such strikes at Khe Sanh, under RABFAC (Radar Beacon Forward Air Control) and brought them in very close, as seen here.

http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org/khe_sanh.htm

TIME says B-52 strikes were delivered a mere 100 meters from the camp's perimeter.

This, recall, is with iron "dumb" bombs, each half the weight of our notional JDAM.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,838216-2,00.html

Regards,

John Kettler

[Dietrich]

John,

Thank you for the reply.

Both in reference to myself and in reference to my friend, I was using "devil's advocate" (note the lower-case "d") in a figurative sense. ("Devil", by the way, derives from the ancient Hebrew word which be translated "opposer" or "resister".)

I bow to your superior knowledge and understanding of post-WW2 military technology. I admit, it's only about WW2 weaponry and tactics and such that I know more than a mere smidgen.

Lee's words about B-52 suggested saturation-type bombing, and in the context of an ambush in a village, it seemed to me a fantasist comment and thus one which I felt compelled to contest.

Sincerely and respectfully,

Dietrich March