Clean hand are not relevant IMO. It is rightly or wrongly a shooting war and doo doo occurs. Most folks do their best to avoid doing dumb stuff but much is inevitable. I totally agree with your comment that we need to stop with the "who shot John" routine. I merely suggest that couching things as SOF / Big Army did this or that is a BS effort aiming precisely at blaming Joe for shooting John -- whoever the devil Joe is -- or John is. That stuff is counterproductive and not helpful -- and, as I've said before, it can obscure otherwise important points.It's not a challenge, it's a foregone conclusion that bad stuff will occur. It's a war.This is the great challenge of going to a foreign land and taking a side in such an internal dispute. Both the government and the insurgent emerge from the populace to compete for dominance, and it is the populace that bears the brunt of such competitions.We noticed. However, many of us do buy that. Some based on experience rather than theory....This is why it frustrates me when so many say "you have to crush the insurgent first, then look at addressing the issues of governance." I just don't buy it...I think that will vary, probably greatly, from situation to situation. There is no one size fits all....Only if one is hard set that the current form of governance must prevail...Been there, done that. More than once. It happens. Try 36 KIA and 118 WIA in less than eight hours out of 302 committed or 2 KIA, 8 WIA out of an A Team in two days. Don't like those, I have more. War's war...Its complicated, but SF guys know this province as well as any. One team took 50% casualties on a prior rotation.
I'm neither bragging or complaining and that's not a hooray for me -- many have been through worse -- it is simply an attempt to add perspective to that rhetorical flourish. As Wilf would say, "war is war." It is, that's a fact and trying to modify what it is will iklely fail as have all previous attempts to do that. Ina war, bad things happen and one just keeps going.
That leads to this:is disingenuous at best. Yes, they have a right to call -- so? Others not in SOF /SF have that right. All do it. All have an obligation -- a statutory and regulatory duty, in fact, to cal and to be quick -- but not to screw up in the process...They have a right to be a little quick to call for assistance when hours or days away from any type of ground support.Sorry, my conversation with Beany wearing CIF and other guys, with dumb Grunts -- mostly 82d types but an occasional Cav or Mech guy -- and a few others from MI to CA does not corroborate your rather mellifluous version. It does not totally discount it, just says it's not nearly that that simple and as Cole wrote above, the night raids guys can and do get carried away and we both know that. As he also correctly mentioned, the short tours and often returning to different AOs does not help in the great SOF vs. the Army "Who knows the country best" war within a war.Most of these teams were almost always in a complex mix of direct and indirect fire and IEDS from the minute they left the gate to the minute they returned, yet they go out every day and keep working to hold the edges of the frontier back so that the conventional forces can have some breathing space as they work the main battle area. But it was in the main battle area that "warning shots" killed civilians virtually every day.
Back to your original comment, not "No clean hands" -- just a lot of hands in a war from all over the Army, some more competent than others in all elements, conventional and otherwise (as always...). The bulk of the errors and failure you cite and which are often posted on this board by others are training shortfalls and / or a flawed personnel system. the two are self reinforcing and are in a constant battle to see which does the least damage (that says they mean well but the system is too flawed for good efforts to pull it out). The third factor is parochial turf protection. There are others, for sure -- but those failures of the US Army are a large causative factor in many of the others.
In any event, parochiality does not help anyone.Of course it's avoidable -- Fix those things I mentioned, they're really more important than trying to chart a new foreign policy which will always be subject to US domestic politics -- and you are not going to fix that.Its frustrating. I also think it is largely avoidable.
Also, do not go into adventures of a new and different kind and do the same things that failed to work in older adventures elsewhere. If you do you'll have the same sorts of problems of language, culture, tortuous ROE, untouchable high altitude errors, excessive control / micromanagement, risk avoidance, minor and great examples of incompetence, political interference, general malfeasance -- and parochial foolishness.
Do things with a broken system and you'll get broken results. Do them in a broken nation and you have discovered double trouble.
I'm just surprised and happy that things are going as well as they are. The Kids, as always, are doing their best...
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