I returned from a forward operating base near Baghdad this summer. I can tell you that there were hundreds of deuce-n halfs, hummers etc driving around. I didn't notice any high failure rate. Our trucks never broke down once either.
One thing you need to realize is the climate over there is brutal. Between the smoke from oil fires, blowing sand and extreme heat, it is tough on any piece of equipment. Our F-16's never missed one single sortie either.
It's my opinion that the media is doing a great disservice to America by sensationalizing everything they can.
Our unit all had body armor, guns, bullets etc... No one was lacking anything.

Did you know that JDAMS's are really left over Vietnam era dumb bombs with a GPS guidance system attached to it? Why doesn't the media say our weapons are outdated? Our F-16's that drop all the ordinance are 86 and 87 models with over 4,000 hours on them. They must be lacking too?

Bad planning???????????? Are you serious?
If planning were bad- thousands of soldiers would be killed by now. I've been to several classified intel briefs about the war and trust me- planning is everything and it is top notch.
Where are you getting your inside knowlege about operations in the combat zone- CNN

 

i must say we are "adapting", most humvees are now armored and the ones that arent are being used in the back. not that i dont value life but when you sighn up as a soldier you kinda need to think you may die right? sure we need to doo all we can but soliders adapt to what they have. and this is fairly new fighting. africa? my goodness man we didnt have the same weapons OR restrictions we do now. we kicked these guys but in war now theyve broken up and are hiding among women and children. let them come out and fight like a real army the way our military is trained and our equipment is designed for in fact ill try calling the bad iraqis later and see if they can fit this in their schedule. somepeople

 

How this thread is not locked in amazing, i give it one more day.

Agreed, it easy to take potshots after the fact. When it comes to military operations, leave it to the military. You have your voice every 4 years.

 

"Rumsfeld gives a retarded answer that 'even if you put all the armor in the world on a tank it can still be destryoed' ".

Maybe he knows a little more about what's going on then you, me and a lot of others. Exactly how much do you know about their weapons? Without being there, we can only guess.

 

General Barry McCaffrey (Ret.), Former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Armed Forces Southern Command; General Montgomery Meigs (Ret.), Former Commander, NATO Stabilization Force


GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY: Well, first of all, God bless American soldiers and Marines. You talk to them, you're going to get the truth out of them. But I think it was a flash of arrogance on the part of the secretary, unfortunately. That answer might have worked in a congressional committee hearing or with the Joint Staff, but it won't work with troops about to deploy into combat. We've got a problem on the ground. It's complex, dangerous. We're three years into the war. We need to put the country at war and not just the armed forces. That's my instinctive response.

GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, it's complex, it's dangerous. I think, actually, Bill is closer to being right than not. And I say that as somebody who fully supports the president's decision to go into Iraq. I thought it was the right war, right time, right place. We're safer because of it. The military piece of it's gone pretty well. I mean, the fighting in Fallujah, Tim, was unbelievable valor and effectiveness on this Marine-Army team. But at the end of the day, you got to say are the politics and economic reconstruction going to work, yes or no? Where is this likely to be in 12 months? I think we're right at the turning point. We better rethink our strategy. I think Secretary Rumsfeld's been in denial of an evidence being presented to him that it's going wrong. You got to face up to it and sort out what should we be doing.

GEN. MEIGS: I kind of agree with that. Look, let me talk you through a little sequence here. There were originally three battalions planned as part of the Marine task force that went into Fallujah. Things went hot in Mosul. They had to pull the Striker battalion out, the one most suited to urban combat. They couldn't start the operations in the triangle of death until they finished Fallujah. What that tells you is that General Casey does not have enough force on the ground, enough reserves to deal with more than one thing at a time.

GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, you know, going to the war, I thought many assumptions--you know, Paul Wolfowitz is taking some bad raps. I still think he's a brilliant guy that is right a lot of the times. The assumptions I thought were probably correct also, but my question was if you're wrong, you risk a political military disaster going in without adequate planning, adequate forces, etc., which I think is what happened. We ended up from day one with the country destroyed by looters, a 26 million-person country. For God's sakes, 400,000-man active armed forces, a million man reserves. They weren't engaged. They walked away with their guns, their money, their leadership in tact.
So there was a sense of arrogance, but that I think is less concern to me than if your initial plan goes wrong, do you rethink it, do you see new realities and adjust rapidly? That's normally been a strength of the U.S. armed forces. We're not doing it now. I think people have dug in their heels over in the Pentagon and said, "We were right. We're not going to cede new changes."

 

Bad Planning ? How about 'what planning'. As a consequence the guard hasn't met it retention goals for the first time in 10 years, which is surprising considering how adamant so many people were about being over there. With so many expressing such high support there should be NO problems with any branch meeting recruitment and retention goals, no need for stop loss, no need for threatening troops with a stop loss deployment to Iraq unless they reenlisted, etc. Each branch should be turning back tens of thousands who are demanding to serve in Iraq so that existing troops and reserves don't have to do yet another tour.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9927782.htm

In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq's long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country's widespread crime and unemployment and America's sometimes heavy boots.

 

This is no different then any other war or conflict. The problem now is that there are too many bleeding heart pacifist that know that todays liberal media will publish anything and everything that is controversial. Most want to see their name in print and get their "15 seconds of fame". No one in the media wants to report good news. Almost all major news agencies have a section for things like "Too Funny to be True, ect", but very,very few have a section titled "Good News Only". Too many people are fool enough to believe that just because they read it, it's got to be true. You need to look at who is saying these things and ask.......who are they (really), how much do they really know, are they speculating, what is their real agenda, what's their past history, etc?

Anyone who looks hard enough can find a far left wing or far right wing publication that says exactly what they want to hear. Mistakes have and all ways will be made by the government, legislators, the military and anyone else making decisions based on information given to them. None of these mistakes are something that will not be corrected when brought to light.

In other words, quit whining and complaining and let history take it's course. This country has been through worse and will get through this!

 

No, it's not just bleeding heart liberal commies:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/m...7m16zinni.html

April 16, 2004

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wondered aloud yesterday how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there instead of returning home as planned.

"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni, a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"

At a Pentagon news briefing yesterday, Rumsfeld said he could not have estimated how many troops would be killed in the past week.

Zinni made his comments during an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune before giving a speech last night at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice as part of its distinguished lecturer series.

For years Zinni said he cautioned U.S. officials that an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would likely be more dangerous to U.S. interests than one with him because of the ethnic and religious clashes that would be unleashed.

"I think that some heads should roll over Iraq," Zinni said. "I think the president got some bad advice."

Known as the "Warrior Diplomat," Zinni is not a peace activist by nature or training, having led troops in Vietnam, commanded rescue operations in Somalia and directed strikes against Iraq and al Qaeda.

He once commanded the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton.

Out of uniform, Zinni was a troubleshooter for the U.S. government in Africa, Asia and Europe and served as special envoy to the Middle East under the Bush administration for a time before his reservations over the Iraq war and its aftermath caused him to resign and oppose it.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...es/secure.html


Paul Van Riper, Lt. Gen., U.S. Marine Corps-Ret:

So the statue of Saddam falls. What are you thinking?

I was thinking two things -- one, obviously proud that this happened. As a Marine, I was proud that the Marines were involved as they were, that they moved so quick and as well as they did. I was proud of the Army forces, proud of all the joint forces. In the back of my mind, though, I had two concerns. One is, what are you going to do with the rest of the country, the northern part of the country that you haven't gone to? What is it you're going to do with all these places you bypassed down south? Literally, what is your plan now that the regime has fallen? I didn't know of one.

I guess deep in my heart I hoped that there was some sort of a secret plan that they were going to follow. ... Just imagine if the follow-on and support forces that were in the original plans had been there, [if] divisions had simply gone around Baghdad and gone up into what we now know is the Sunni triangle; clamped down; let them see the hard heel of occupation, at least for a short period; get secured; prevent the looting; go into places in the South that were bypassed; get ahold of the weapons; get them under control; get into some of these places where there were alleged weapons of mass destruction, find out what was really there; prevent this radioactive material from escaping. That's the kind of forces you needed. No one can quibble over the right size force for capturing Baghdad. But for a war with the nation of Iraq and for actually occupying the country as we claimed we wanted to do, totally insufficient. This is literally Operations 101.



Joseph P Hoar, Gen., U.S. Marine Corps-Ret, Commander, CENTCOM (1991-1994):

Well, I think there's a couple problems. First of all, [former Director of Operations in Somalia, Gen.] Tony Zinni, when he was at CENTCOM, had started to think about this and had a plan. Nobody ever asked to see it. Nobody ever looked at it. I'm told that the Army War College up at Carlisle in Pennsylvania put together a plan for the reconstruction. Nobody ever asked to look at it. ...

Now, the developmental piece has been equally screwed up. As you know, there was $18 billion authorized and appropriated for the rebuilding of Iraq. Only $600 million has been spent today. The fiscal year is about ready to end, and a very small portion of that money has been spent thus far. Clearly we're not doing very well on the developmental side either. I don't know why. But clearly the wrong people are out there trying to do the job.


Thomas White, Gen., U.S. Army-Ret., Secretary of the Army, 2001-2003:

…Face-forward planning: What happened?

The working assumptions were that the Iraqi people would behave themselves. There will be a few dead-enders and former Baathists that will have to be dealt with, but by and large, they assumed away the problem. ... Now, mind you, Gen. Rick Shinseki was the only guy in the whole senior structure who had actually had hands-on, on-the-ground experience in running a stabilization force. In his case, it was Bosnia. So you would think that his views on the subject would have carried some weight, and unfortunately, they did not.

Wolfowitz says to a congressional committee that he can't conceive of a situation where the forces required for the stabilization phase would be greater than the forces required for the military operation. All of us in the Army felt just the opposite, that there was a long history of that being absolutely true; that the defeat of the Iraqi military would be a relatively straightforward operation of fairly short duration for all the reasons Doug Macgregor had to say. That was all true. ... But the securing of the peace and the security of a country of 25 million people spread out over an enormous geographic area would be a tremendous challenge that would take a lot of people, a lot of labor, to be done right. And nobody wanted to hear that. And we are dealing with the consequences of that to this day.

 

"Ret".......another bunch on the outside looking in.

Who has said that everything in Iraq has gone perfect or as planned? I didn't, the President didn't, Rumsfeld didn't. Name me one war, ours or someone else's, that has gone exactly as planned. Anyone can usually get it right with a quick one-two punch (ie, Slick *****), but that proved, and proves, that that get us nowhere.

Some people don't seem to remember the sacrifices of the past that allows them to live their tushy lives and sit around and complain because everything is not perfect in this greatest nation in the world. I'm glad we have people that will step up and take responsibility and make hard decisions. There are very few of you that have the gonads to make the decisions these people make on a daily basis. Stop and think of the decisions they made today and compare them with the decisions you made today. No comparison!

The most employees I ever had was 250. Not near the pressure DR has, and I know how bad it tee'd me off when someone in a meeting would ask a question about something that they know is being addressed daily. I don't blame the soldier, I blame the idiot reporter that put him up to it. He's nothing but a low life small timer that saw a chance to make it to the "bigs" for a few hours. And then again, there are a lot of folks out there just like him.

Everyone out there from Rumsfeld down are doing their best to do the right thing . You need to forget about what happened yesterday, stop your critizing, and learn to support what's happening today and tomorrow.

 

amen

 

Ret: Another bunch on the outside looking in.
I would think that this is a pretty knowledgeable group. What I don't understand is why some people think that the press is out to sink this country and why it is always the Liberal Press. The press didn't take us to Iraq,the press didn't lie to us about WMD, or are we still looking for them, I haven't heard,and the press with all of their LIES haven't cost us 1300 lives. I would think that by now ole 'W' would 'fess up' and tell the people the truth about what's going on over there. Some one asked what military opperation goes according to plan. I can think of of a couple, MacArthur's landing at Inchon, the Normandy invasion and Hiroshima. Great planning, great leadership and execution, not so in this conflict. Not even the retired military leaders agree with the way this operation is going. The president should've read his fathers book where he gave the reasons for not going to Bagdad during the first gulf war and it wasn't because of the UN mandate. Somehow I have a problem supporting something that I feel is wrong and costing our country billions of dollars and thousands of young lives. JMO

Jim

 

The other night I listened to a radio program that had a guest that works with the armor plating kits that go into the humvees 2 1/2 ton trucks and five ton trucks. He said that in 2002 there were about 150 armored vehicles in Iraq and today there are over 150,000. Sounds to me that they are working on it. I think that they should get the embedded newsmongers out of the area. They have been nothing but embarrisment and trouble for the American troops.

With the news attitude and their being embedded with the troops I think it is astounding that there are only two or three reports of bad actions by troops. Must be some real responsible acting young people out there with M-16's. How would you like to be in combat with big brother looking over your shoulder with a TV camera. Non combatints should not be involved in military action. Let them go in after and count the bodies.

 

Normandy?

Certainly an eventual success, but that example of a "great plan, great leadership, great execution" cost approximately 3,000 Allied lives on the first day.

I get tired of the "he lied about WMD's" argument. Did we find any, not really. Did he ever have any, yes - at least the Kurds and the Iranians think so - they were on the receiving end. Did he want us to think he still had them (regardless of wether he did or not)? I would say yes. Was he willing to use them again? The Kurds and Iranians would say so. Would he be willing to make them available to a third party that was willing to attack us on our own soil? Probably.

I favor an offensive strategy. Playing defense means you have to be right all the time, every time. Thank the Lord for our military men and women that are willing to take the fight to the middle east rather than have us deal with it at home.

Working through the United Nations? Give me a break, I don't even trust the sales rep at my local dealer.

 

Amen Nevada. One day of Normandy cost more lives than Iraq likely will in it's entirety. Folks try to compar Viet Nam too...which cost over 50,000 American lives.

99% of both principle parties believed Saddam currently had WMD's. Saddam did everything in his power to promote their existence. I think in the end he was trying to put up a big front to Iran, but he should've realized there was a bigger kid on the block and a bigger danger to his power lust.

And HID....I agree...they must be extraordinarily professional soldiers to have less than a handfull of "soldier gone rogue" stories around.

 

Inchon:
Sept 15 to Oct 1, 1950 Causalities: 222

A totally different situation then Iraq. Not a good comparison.

Hiroshima: We could do this again, but I hope none of us want to see this happen to the innocent people of Iraq.

Five years after the atomic bombing it was estimated that 200,000 people had died from it in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, and bomb-related deaths have continued to this day. The damage inflicted on people includes burns from heat radiation and fire. Other people were crushed under debris, injured by the blast wave, or had atomic diseases from initial and residual radiation, with symptoms of fatigue, aluea, vonéting, high fevers, diarrhea, bleeding, loss of hair and decrease in white blood cells. Since then many survivors have suffered aftereffects such as leukemia and cancer. At first U.S. authorities denied that people in the bombed cities were suffering from exposure to radiation.
* I'm sure these numbers are not exact, but they're close and make my point.

Normandy: A victory in the end, but a disaster at the beginning.