Fire with Fire

[JMA]

Why reinvent the wheel?

Go look at how SOG was formed and fielded its teams, especially between 1967 and 1969. This was an organization that formed more or less on the fly, and conducted some amazing operations. They weren't all SF-qualified, and much of their training pipeline was improvised locally.

Do you have a source on this SOG you can direct attention to?

[JMA]

Where is jcustis? Isn't this work for the USMC Recon? (not saying that the army shouldn't get involved in this sort of thing.)

[SJPONeill]

Possibly the key to the 'eastern style' is not so much that it is 'eastern' in origin but that it is the offensive philosophy in this conflict where are forces are on the defensive...if the western world was to decide to go on the offensive, in an irregular manner, against unnamed adversaries states (insert your pet hate nation here) then perhaps we could very much operate in the manner suggested in the opening post?

[jmm99]

a very quiet professional - seriously (IMO). When his recon company led the 2003 East Side charge to Baghdad (with Fox's Rick Leventhal as embed, then and now, Thank You To The 1st L.A.R.), I suspect that he would have as preferred to avoid the publicity and preserve his anonimity. Of course, his real expertise is in the area of sheep and goat husbandry.

Regards to Jon and others,

Mike

[howard]

oh i'd assume Rex that they have the simpler gear to stay in touch. and i'd assume WE'D have a full snooping ability to intercept and listen in...wouldn't you?
the com traffic would be a good thing to plot and evaluate with one of those supercomputers the government has laying idle.

find out who's talking and where they are. lay down GPS guided bombs to everyone of them at the same time is what i'd suggest.

[Fuchs]

find out who's talking and where they are.
lay down GPS guided bombs to everyone of them at the same
time is what i'd suggest.

Complication #1:
Half of the people on the phone sit on a moving motorcycle, shadowing a MRAP patrol.

Complication #2:
The others sit in villages, among civilians. You'd get one possibly quite unimportant guy with a mobile phone and kill also his family of ten.

There are reasons why the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who went to Afghanistan didn't solve the riddle yet.

[JMA]

[snip]

might i suggest the force multiplier WE need in this is a significantly larger air surveillance presence in AWACS , "Joint STARS" , or UAV flights. this is especially needed with IR system detection of such forces as they move in the terrain at night or by day.

with our air eyes, there is no reason to ever be surprised by an attack or by an ambush. we would have seen them as they moved, deployed, and
set up for assaults.

[snip]

Good thinking. And as part of the training and operational monitoring the commander can use UAVs to shadow the troops as they move. I would suggest that a lot could be learned from watching our own as much as we look out for the Taliban. Comes down to resources I suppose.

[carl]

might i suggest the force multiplier WE need in this is a significantly larger air surveillance presence in AWACS , "Joint STARS" , or UAV flights. this is especially needed with IR system detection of such forces as they move in the terrain at night or by day.

with our air eyes, there is no reason to ever be surprised by an attack or by an ambush. we would have seen them as they moved, deployed, and
set up for assaults.

People tend to overestimate the effectiveness of these aerial assets. The real high tech things like JSTARS do wonderous things but they are extremely expensive so there will never be very many of them. And they can't see through mountains.

The other platforms that use night or day vision cameras don't really see that much. The field of view isn't that big, relative to the size of the area you want to cover. They can be heard from the ground, which can be an advantage and a disadvantage. The bigger ones like the Predators cost more than you think and they require a surprising amount of manpower to operate. Aviation Week quoted a figure of about 120 people per Pred when everyone is included. They are much more affected by weather than a manned aircraft.

The drones are a great tool, but you will never have enough of them to provide the degree of overwatch you suggest, especially if there are a multitude of small units roaming the field.