BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - Once again, the military establishment proves...

BAR[_2_]

In article ,
says...

You were going to have a mission shift if we went into Afghanistan in
force. The original plan was a covert hit squad.

Who is "you"? Bush let Rumsfeld dictate a tiny army with no ability to have
boots on the ground, despite the recommendations from the military.

The rhetorical you.
We are proving a huge army is not much more effective in the mountains
than a little hit team.

Most people have no concept of what the military is like and what it
requires. The military is like a viper. The dangerous end is the head
but, the rest of the body enable the had to keep moving. The larger the
head, the larger the body must be. Once the body gets to a certain size
the head becomes immovable due to the fact that it doesn't have the
energy to drag the rest of the body along with it to where it needs to
quickly go.

You simply can not move a mass army as fast as they had to if they
were going to get Osama by brute force. It has been almost 10 years
and we still don't have that much power in that area.
When we started chasing OBL we had local support but he was moving
into an area that would rather shoot us than help us. It is still true
today and we still do not really have any operational control there
with 140,000 people on the ground.
There are still 100 al queda there that we can't catch.

We have about 95K in Afg. and about the same number in Iraq.

That is the number after we finish the surge, that has taken months to
get going and we were already there in force . How long do you think
it would have taken to deploy the army you think Bush should have used
at a moment's notice? Do you think OBL would have waited patiently for
them?

You act like we can instantly drop a division into an area nobody
actually knows much about, with no real way to support them and expect
more than half of them to survive.
If you want to say we wasted a lot of our "covert" resources in Iraq,
no argument but from where we were, we did about all we could do.
I do believe a small covert force, working with the locals was the
only way we would get OBL.
We had a hard enough time finding Saddam and it was in a totally
conqured country.

A division of war fighters requires about 30,000 support troops. So for
every guy carrying a gun there are at a minimum 3 REMFs in support of
him.