Manbij - OPSEC fail, or just "forget it, Jake, it's Syria"..?

Lots of bloviation about the bomb assassination of a bunch of Kurdish "Manbij Military Council" militiamen and four of the U.S. liaison team meeting with them at a kebab shop in the Kurdish-held Syrian town, most of it pearl-clutching about whether "...this means the Islamic State isn't really defeated!!!"

That's not my question. No, duh, the IS isn't "defeated". They're pissed-off Sunni tribesmen. So long as the governments in Baghdad and Damascus are Shiite in some form the zero-sum politics of the Fertile Crescent means that pissed-off Sunni tribesmen are going to be killing people. You can't "defeat" that without killing ALL the Sunni tribesmen, or giving the Sunni tribesmen alternatives to killing people, and that fucking ship has sailed.

No. My question is; how the hell does some Islamic State bomb squad get the intel on where and when this meeting is being held in time to get their fall guy there in time to blow everybody to hell? Is there some sort of IS pizza-delivery bomb taxi squad sitting by the phones, vests on, ready to burn rubber to where one of their spies has just called in a big meet between the YPG and the gringos? Is Manbij that porous, that IS guys can drift in and set up bomb-making and bomb-delivery units just where-ever, and that their guys can spot juicy targets and hit them at a moment's notice?

Or is the MMC OPSEC so damn poor that the IS guys knew about this a couple of days in advance?

Frankly, IMO all this does is make the case for grabbing a hat. If the only people in Syria trusted enough to embed GIs with can't do a better job of securing their own territory then it can't be done. We got the hell out of Iraq for the simple reason that we couldn't get the place down to civil levels of violence without Roman methods. This suggests that the northeastern corner of Syria is likely to be just as impossible.

No, boys. The Islamic State is never going to "be defeated" if by that you mean that they will be unable to kill people. If that's your endstate the U.S. might as well make Syria the fifty-first goddamn state, because we're going to be there forever.

Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?

Remember Sammy the Whiny Seal we talked about back in February?

Well, turns out that that Dark Nexus of infomercials, CNN, has brewed a tempest in...I don't know, something smaller and less significant than a teacup. A shotglass? (Probably appropriate, since the whole damn nonsense makes me want to drink heavily).

I won't bother you with the sissy-fight, something about which sailor put two rounds in Osama's ten-ring. Go read the article at the link, if you care.

But here's what bugs me. Back in the day we fought dangerous people. Seriously dangerous guys, people who controlled entire armies, fleets, scads of big ol' bombers loaded with torpedoes and five-hundred pound blobs of high explosive. Guys who could command the actions of millions of hard-core, well-trained, dangerous sons-of-bitches.

Well, it took millions of us, but we fought them, and won. And then went back to work, making cars, building houses, watching television, electing rubes and gomers, stealthily gettin' busy after the kids went to bed. Y'know, being regular civilians in a nation at peace.

We got over ourselves, is what I'm saying. We seem to have gotten over getting over ourselves, if this ridiculous nonsense over who actually put bullets in the World's Tallest Saudi is any indication. Faced with the saddest lot of raggedy-ass fundamentalist wannabees we have let ourselves become some sort of quasi-Star Wars Empire, farkling about all over the world, torturing and disappearing people, and letting folks who shouldn't be allowed to run a raffle directing our politics and military operations that most of us don't know - or, much care - about. We're at perpetual war, and yet, who gives a shit?

The guy who shot down the aircraft carrying ADM Isoroku Yamamoto, who could have wreaked more havoc in his sleep than Osama could have on his Best Day Ever,

"...joined the 449th Fighter Squadron in China, still flying P-38s. He claimed three further Japanese planes probably destroyed and damaged, but he was shot down on his 139th mission, bailing out near Kiukiang on April 29. He was rescued by Chinese civilians, who treated his injuries and escorted him to safety five weeks later. At the end of the war, Barber attained the rank of major and commanded one of America's first jet squadrons. He retired as a colonel in 1961."

Guy didn't get out with four years to run until retirement. He didn't get into a public pissing contest with CPT Lanphier, the other guy involved in the shootdown.

It was just another day at war. And when the war was over - which We the People WANTED it to be - we got on with the business of getting back to business.

Now, this. It's perfect; the entire business of this ridiculous "War on Terror" in a shotglass. Neverending. Inconclusive. Utterly meaningless. But chock-full of noisy, furious bullshit.

Who gives a shit who "killed bin Laden"? We soldiers were once taught that we were a team; that every one of us was important to completing the mission, from the chancre-mechanic that gave us our plague shot to the guy who drove the truck that took our Class V down to the port of embarkation, to the cooks who mermited our hot chow up to the firebase to the guy who pulled security while we slept.

And, yet, here we are; sitting at home listening to a couple of knuckleheads pissing down each others' legs about who shot some scruffy wog in a dirty house in butt-rump Pakistan. And CNN, which should have a pantsload of better things to talk about (How did Osama manage to sit around Abbotabad - described as location of "...the regimental headquarters for the Frontier Force Regiment, the Baloch Regiment and Pakistan Army Medical Corps and Kakul Military Academy..." - for years without our old pal Pakistan giving us the heads-up..?), that managed to pass the tenth anniversary of the Iraq Debacle without so much as a whimper of discontent that the montebanks, grifters, thugs, and stooges that lied us into that Mess-o-potamia (and comprehensively screwed what was going on in Afghanistan in the process) are still with us, nattering on Morning Joe and Meet the Press as if they weren't as complicit as Bob MacNamara in getting a bunch of Americans killed in somebody else's goddamn civil war.

If that doesn't say something about us, and something not very complimentary, I don't know what the hell it does.

Quis Custodiet?

I kinda hate to keep hammering on this nonsense.



It probably bores the hell out of you like any other family feud and I admit that it really is a sort of military "inside baseball"; of interest only to the sort of people who keep stats and obsessively squirrel away bizarre trivia about obscure minor leagues.

But, like jock itch, this story gets to me in particularly tender places.

And, kidding aside, I think it says some things that concern me about my country and my armed forces. So I apologize, but I'm gonna vent a little here.

One is the irritating nature of the "Global War on Terror" as presented to, and accepted by, the U.S. public.

Ever since 2002 I've thought that the most ominous part of the various wars and quasi-wars and secret wars we've been fighting (largely in the unpaved portions of Asia and Africa) is the way they have been almost completely removed from and independent of public opinion and public purview. The U.S. public as a whole neither pays a price nor has an interest in what their soldiers are doing in the less paved parts of the world under the auspices of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.

I could go over why this isn't a good idea, the multiple reasons that cabinet wars and imperial expeditions are not in the best interests of a democracy. The inevitable erosion of liberal governance and the expansion of executive power that occur in wartime. The moral and intellectual hazard of accustoming a people to continual, low-grade expeditionary wars (without immediate costs or consequences to the people bankrolling the wars). The bad habits that governments, troops, and citizens pick up whilst committing mayhem in places to other peoples without either seeing or feeling the effects of the mayhem themselves.

We've effectively turned these damn wars into a third-person shooter game, complete with it's own fucking music video and all, for God's sake. And - although largely unwilling to join the fight ourselves and uncaring about the real people who do - we've turned our pixellated images of them into cartoonish heroes, ridiculously inflated and lionized "warriors" for what should be a warrior-free zone: an industrial democratic republic.

So this "Shooter" has become, for me, a living version of the crayon-drawing of a modern American "warrior" that We the People seem to want; imputed with unlikely and improbable virtues, excused all critical assessment, feted and fetishized and blown up beyond the reality of what soldiers have always been. Your neighbor's idle brother, the smart kid behind the counter at the convenience store, the nice guy your sister dumped because "he was boring", the knucklehead who cut you off at the freeway on-ramp.

What especially got to me on this subject was the fawning reaction this Shooter got when he and his cronies stopped off on Capitol Hill (see the first link above), where the people who should have been his fellow citiens and notional governmental superiors treated him like a bunch of gushing fangirls and fell all over him to praise his work which is, at bottom, no more than any other infantryman has been asked to do in this endless farkling about in central Asia only with fancier kit and more secrecy.

This basically irks the shit out of me, this whole business about fellating the "warriors" and bumper-sticker patriotism and endless painless videogame wars. I don't think it's healthy for a republic and I don't think it's a smart thing for us as the notional sovereigns of the United States to be doing to ourselves.

And this "Shooter" has become the poster child for all of my irritation with my fellow citizens.

The other problem I have with this story is what I think it says about a troubling development within my Army and the U.S. ground troops in general, by the way one of the guys from one of the Navy's Special Operations outfits feels about the rest of the Navy and (by inference) the other military outfits he is forced to share the battlefield with.

The magilla with this Shooter has been his loud complaints about how tough it is to be him, how tough the Special Operations outfits have it, and how - because of that - he and they deserve special consideration; early retirement pension vestment and special benefits if they ETS before they earn their retirement.

By publicly agitating for special privileges for the Special Operations forces - and only the SOF - this Shooter is taking a fire axe to this weak join between the SOF and the line units. By publicly demonstrating his contempt for the guys in the Navy Choir, for the line squids on the carrier decks and in the Stores warehouse at Norfolk this Shooter is fueling the fire of resentment and irritation that these guys, many of them, probably feel for him and his high-speed brethern.

One of the reasons that the U.S. Army and the other U.S. services have been so competent and successful tactically is that they have always been good at working together as a team. Every element in the team; the combat, combat support, and combat service support units, and individuals, recognize their mutual dependence. The guy who kicks down the door depends on the helo driver overhead who depends on the avionics tech back at the FOB who depends on the guy loading the supply truck back at the Corps rear who depends on the PAC clerk working the computer back at Ft. Ben Harrison back in the States. Who, for God's sake, depends on the guy in the 82nd Chorus singing at some fucking high school in Cornhole, Iowa to get the kids all excited about volunteering for the Army.

And one reason all those people work together is the understanding that they're all in the same Army; they all - although some get a little more money and some get to wear some cooler uniforms - get the same basic deal.

They HAVE to work together to win, and the way the service treats their service recognizes that fact. The door-kicker doesn't succeed if the PAC clerk fucks up his pay, his allotment doesn't get to his family, their e-mails get him all fucked up and so that night he's thinking about his sick daughter's not getting TRICARE instead of the people who might be behind the door with a nasty surprise for him and his team.

But the Shooter doesn't care, or probably doesn't even know, about this. And because of that he's busy kicking in a door that I don't think, either as a soldier or a U.S. citizen, we want to open. It does and will do us no good to make our special operations units a sort of Special Republican Guard, and the example of the originals should tell us so.

There's always an entropy in military organizations that works around eliteness. The elites can easily start looking down on everyone else with contempt and everyone else starts envying and resenting the elites.

In Third World armies this can cripple the organization; the Iraqi Republican Guard was a classic of the genre.

The Guard was vastly expanded in the Eighties to ensure the loyalty of an Army fractured by the war with Iran. After the defeat in the Second Gulf War of '91 the Special Republican Guard was created to provide even more "eliteness" loyal to the regime. Each time it was the best guys, the most loyal, the smartest and most technically proficient who were pulled into the "elite".

By 2003 the bulk of the Iraqi Army was just fucking incapable of modern military operations and the U.S. Army went through it like a dose of salts. All that "eliteness"? As useless as a tampon in a typhoon.

The U.S. military is nowhere near as big a jugfuck as the Iraqis were and U.S. society is nothing like the trainwreck that Iraqi society was and is.

But this "Shooter" represents something I haven't seen before in the U.S. military; an elite-unit guy willing to just come out and flat-out say; I'm better than you, I work harder than you, this war (the way it's being fought and my role in it compared to yours) means that I deserve more and better stuff than you.

And those are exactly the sorts of things that led to the Special Republican Guard. We just don't have a Saddam here willing to use them to MAKE a Special Republican Guard.

But there's nothing in human nature or U.S. society that says we can't find one.

And between that and what this "Shooter" nonsense says about our country and our soldiers I can't help but worry at least a little.

Why I Write

But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
--Crazy, Gnarls Barkley
_____________________

[Motivated by Sgt. Rabb's post]:

I was a soldier once and now not-so-young, a fact which allows me to connect the dots from present to past. The logic of soldiering has been left deeply ingrained in my thoughts and actions.

Last night was suffused with memories of past screw-ups and negative events that I still cannot justify or accept as being correct. Today's events resurface them, and I am discomfited down to my Ranger lizard brain.

When I was a platoon leader, my assigned strength equaled the 37 men killed in the recent shoot-down of the Chinook in Afghanistan. My platoon was line infantry, not elite in any manner. We did, however, stress one military precept: Dispersion.

We never put all our eggs in one basket. We would never allow one military round to kill or wound more than was militarily acceptable. We maintained dispersion while eating and even in the chow line when we were operational. My tracks (M 106) were never bunched up to allow enemy counter battery to knock out more than one of our guns. Not being bunched up is Rule One of ground combat.

On or about 21/22 Jan 71 there was an action at B53 in the Republic of Vietnam in which another entire helicopter of highly-trained Special Forces and Special Operations Assets men were blown out of the sky. To this day it is my contention that these men were sacrificed because there was not a proper and judicious recon. Helo gunship fire suppression of the area was not employed and the men did not know what enemy they were facing nor their capabilities.

U.S. SOF assets are still making the same senseless mistakes that get good men killed for no measurable reason. What is the benefit of the cost?

Thirty soldiers died at the hands (we are told) of a lucky RPG gunner. But in Special Forces, we are taught there is no such thing as "luck" -- there is only the presence or absence of solid planning and execution. No unit should lose 37 people associated gear from one lucky RPG shot.

Such a loss is criminal negligence on the part of the operational planners and team leaders. No sensible soldier would put all his assets in one bunch, hoping luck would not turn ill; it does not work that way either in gang warfare or combat.

Ranger does not believe the shoot down of the Chinook was an RPG loss. Why does the media not posit the employment of a ground-to-air Redeye or Strella-type missile? If the U.S. uses technology, then why not the Afghanis? Why the fiction that their successes are due to sheer, dumb-ass luck? The Gods of War need not be Christian or Western.

What would it mean if they were as tactical as we?

[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar]

Dead Babies Don't Cry

Dead babies can take care of themselves
Dead babies can't take things off the shelf
--Dead Babies, Alice Cooper

We've shot an amazing number of people
and killed a number and, to my knowledge,
none has proven to have been
a real threat to the force
--General Stanley McChrystal

--My father is no different than any powerful man,
any man with power, like a president or senator
--Do you know how naive you sound, Michael?
Presidents and senators don't have men killed.
--Oh. Who's being naive?
--The Godfather (1972)
________________

The Special Forces that Ranger served in is as gone as last month's rent. An astute reader called the shift, the devolution of the Special Forces into a kind of Sonderkommando.

The Vietnam era SF fought main force Vietcong, hardcore North Vietnamese Army, and conducted special missions with various programs such as Delta, Omega and Studies and Operations Group (SOG). These programs produced results that were soldierly and based in good faith efforts.

Personally, Ranger was never trained to kick in doors or assassinate. We were not assassins, since that violates the rules of land warfare. There were isolated incidents of killing suspected enemy agents, but this was never officially sanctioned U.S. or SF policy.

The assassinations conducted by the infamous Project Phoenix were not a U.S. military mission, although most of their U.S. shooters were U.S. Special Forces soldiers on detached duty. The killings were done by combat-numb SF assets detached to do a mission not military in nature; the program was undeserving of having utilized good SF personnel for a dirty, nasty business. Phoenix was the devil's work and will remain a stain upon our national dignity, both civilian and military.

But it's now 2010 and the SF top dog in Afghanistan has dusted off the Phoenix prototype for Counterinsurgency applications. General McChrystal has done this without asking how the U.S. SF assassins are differentiated from the Nazi SS assassins of WW II. How have McChrystal, our command authorities and the American people enabled the Special Forces to become a criminal organization?

There is no middle ground here: When SF employs assassins they have become criminals and murderers rather than honorable soldiers.

Do our SF soldiers no longer bother to question the legality of their black ops missions? Further, why do we even allow a concept like Black Ops to exist within our military structure? Assassination is one of the key tactics of terror organizations, whether they be state-sponsored or groups like al-Qaeda.

When U.S. SF assassinate, this is an act of state-sponsored terrorism. If it is a crime for al-Qaeda to assassinate, then it is a crime for U.S. SF to assassinate.

When an SF team killed pregnant women while on an assigned mission to kill or capture mid- or low-level Taliban members, they mutilated the bodies in their efforts to dig out their bullets (U.S. Special Forces 'Tried to Cover Up' Botched Khataba Raid"), also a violation of the rules of land warfare and every bit as serious an offense as cutting the ears off dead VC.

My Army became infamous for those actions and as a result for a generation was portrayed as being composed of crazed killers by the entertainment media. Contrast that with today's support for SF assassins because they are "the troops".

These SF assassinations at McChrystal's behest are not military in nature and are a cynical expression of an American military gone wrong. Their morals are gone missing and this is a blight upon all of us.

Even if the mission were to kill every Talib in Afghanistan America still loses, as on a strategic level this removes the regional counterbalance to Iran, concurrently strengthening the warlords of the Northern Alliance. With every assassination, an SF soldiers is doing Iran's dirty work, making the effort doubly perverse.

Assassinations in theatre do not benefit the safety of America, nor do they contribute to the birth of democracy. They constitute meaningless cynical violence.

What attributes are being rewarded in today's tabbed-up, Christian Army? The contradictions are overwhelming to contemplate.

The SF assassin soldiers will bear a heavy burden. The silence that will surround these men is the absence of a baby's cry in a remote Afghan village, and the silence will condemn their souls. They may never be officially charged for their crimes, but they will always hear that silence, even in their sleep.

[cross-posted at RangerAgainstWar]