Escape and Evasion

 No stop signs, speed limit
Nobody's gonna slow me down
Like a wheel, gonna spin it
Nobody's gonna mess me round 
--Highway to Hell, AC/DC
_______________________

Here's to remembering the events of 9-11-01, the beginning of the United State's Stalingrad.

To mark the 11-year anniversary, Daniel Politi at Slate ran the following: "Report: Bush Ignored Many Al-Qaida Warnings".  Say it ain't so, Daniel.

And below is a selection from "The Special Forces Guide to Escape and Evasion" (subtitled: "The SF Guy's Guidebook to Love".)  That's a little levity on a day for which there is not much reason to be light. It is from a section entitled, "Bravo Two Zero", about an SAS road watch patrol code named "B20" and their insertion in Iraq in 1991.

 Ranger likes this bit because it shows how it is supposed to be done:

 "When the NCO commanding Road Watch South landed, he did not release the helicopter before he had assessed the terrain.  This was open and flat and in the words of one trooper, the patrol would have been 'as obvious as a turd on a billiard table.'  The NCO and patrol decided that without vehicles it was a futile operation and were wisely withdrawn back to Saudi Arabia, for subsequent redeployment (60)."

Not only did the NCO do an aerial visual reconnaissance, he did not release the aircraft until he was satisfied he was in the right place and could continue his mission.  After a ground reconnaissance he deemed it a "futile mission" and so aborted it.

Unfortunately, Road Watch North -- in a similar exposed location -- did not abort.  They went in low on equipment, expecting to be self-sufficient for 14 days, a formula for disaster, which is exactly what they met with. Only one man, Corporal Ryan, survived.

Sometimes, quitting the mission is the correct move.  Today, it does not seem they will ever not continue the mission, come hell or high water.

In Mind Country

We will have to repent in this generation
not merely for the vitriolic words and actions
of the bad people,
but for the appalling silence of the good people
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Have a very good reason for everything you do
--Laurence Olivier
____________________

From Special Forces: The Changing Face of Warfare -- "Watts appreciated that however much the policy of hearts and minds might weaken the enemy, it would never destroy him" [Lloyd, p.109] Note for 2011 Pentagon warriors: they are speaking of the enemy, for one need not win the hearts and minds (H & M) of friends, an obvious but little emphasized point.

This got Ranger thinking about his particular neuroses and psychoses that add up to his personality, and how they meet the erosion of sanity in U.S. policy in his lifetime. Specifically, the run-up to our current imbroglios, Gulf War I which turned a local oil and terrain squabble between two absurdist states into a coalition to liberate Kuwait from oppression.

During the time of that campaign Ranger was in a Department of Veterans Affairs-sponsored therapy group for PTSD veterans; all were Vietnam veterans except the facilitator, bought and paid for by DVA. He was a non-veteran academic pretending to understand our points of view.

To my memory, the facilitator and most groupies were Gung-ho about the new war, forgetting the fact that all of us were fractured by a similar war 20 years prior. One ooh-rah group member, K-2 -- an SOF/130 Aircraft Gunship type -- was fine until a 130 AC was shot down and all aboard killed. My comment was, "They got what they were dishing out," which earned me an expulsion from the group for being TOO HOSTILE, which according to the PTSD diagnosis is a common attribute of the disorder.

What has this got to do with H & M? In Gulf War I, H & M were not discussed; we just killed the hell out of Iraqis and everyone cheered, even PTSD-plagued veterans. But in Gulf War II we have vacillated between H & M-ing them and Seven Six Two-ing them, all the while hailing the validity of Counterinsurgency policy (COIN). (So successful were we that the Iraqi parliament recently affirmed that Hammurabi's Code was in accordance with Sharia law, and the COIN actually predates the Christian bible; Ranger is undercutting Glenn Beck's comeback here.)

Point is, H & M is a con job perpetrated upon the U.S. taxpayer but we're too myopically-focused on the back streets of the Arab world to see this. Enter Libya -- the most recently discovered Arab ne'er -do-well -- and the U.S. does not even attempt to win the H & M of Qaddafi loyalists (our erstwhile, sort-of, friends.) So the U.S. bombs and presumably later will give the H & M shtick a go. When will the U.S. military realize is not very good at this H & M thing; they did not win mine, and they will not win the enemy's.

Where is the sanity in selectively employing a failed policy in an insane world? We have a fiction called COIN and it does not win H & M, and we have a policy called bombing that does not win low-intensity conflict, guerrilla wars or wars of rebellion.

Expecting otherwise is like willing time to run backwards and hoping Saigon is not Ho Chi Minh City.