Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
The original name, “The Forever War”, was already taken.
US military publishes plans for “The Long War“.
(Thx to J, from previous comments.)
| Print article |
Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
US military publishes plans for “The Long War“.
(Thx to J, from previous comments.)
| Print article |
about 4 years ago
It may be shorter than expected if Iran keeps talking shit.
–TR
about 4 years ago
I’ve been wondering how secure our bases in Iraq are, if the Iranians decide that an attack on thier soil merits launching a cross border strike against our troops or contractors in Iraq. How defensible are those Halliburton logistics bases?
about 4 years ago
That is the longest BS press docet I’ve ever seen.
Basically it doesn’t address any issues, and paints the whole thing as if it’s gone off without a hitch, and been the plan all along. A long bit on how the invasion of Afghanistan went, then Iraq? Covered by “we liberated them, and now they’re free!”, then on to “so we’re training the security forces..” Nothing about insurgencies, bombs, terrorist factions, anything. And every other page has some “really wants to be a news printing” photo op of peaceful operations with loving liberated people.
*sigh* The point of this mandated report was to give everyone an accurate view of how things are going. All the report wound up being is a very long “everything’s fine, we’re not having any problems!” designed not to piss off anyone who backed the war effort.
about 4 years ago
And more reading: Lessons learned didn’t include a single thing about better intel, verifying infantry equipment, or chain of command issues?
Four years of a botched invasion that wasn’t supposed to take more than a year, prison abuses, infantry without armor, and messed up long term deployments and last minute deployment changes (people have been on the tacmac in an airplane to go to iraq, and had their orders canceled), discipline issues in our own ranks, and you can’t think of anything we could do better or work on in those regards?
God damn this is frustrating. It’s not even talking to a wall, they’re either releasing this in hopes of snowing the public, or releasing it because they’re blatantly unable to admit things may not have gone as they planned.
about 4 years ago
I’m pretty sure Joe Haldeman would have sold them the rights at a fraction of the cost of preparing that policy.
(I notice the pentagon is still on the forefront in the battle against the English language as well – just when did “operationalizing” become a word?)
about 4 years ago
WTF, Kalain? Not more than a year? Who ever promised that? We’re still in Japan and Germany, for goodness sakes, 61 years and counting! Total casualties are still below the one DAY counts for some previous wars and well below the one battle counts for most wars. If this is a botched war, I’d like more of them, please.
about 4 years ago
“WTF, Kalain? Not more than a year? Who ever promised that? “
I dunno, I seem to remember some guy landing on an aircraft carrier some time back and saying something about “mission accomplished!”, but that’s just me…
about 4 years ago
“Not more than a year? Who ever promised that?”
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/14/rumsfeld.iraq/
about 4 years ago
Ayup, part of the administration’s pitch of the war was that it would be dirt cheap, have no complications, and be over in less than a year.
Five years later, they don’t seem to think they may have had flawed planning on that aspect. It was dismissed when people kept pointing out that nobody’s ever invaded a country and settled all dissent in a few months.
The problem is they had this really wierd thought that we’re the good guys, and would be greeted by flower parades and liberated women, not seen as invaders for, go figure, invading. No matter how much people dislike the republican administration right now, if someone invaded and toppled them, there wouldn’t be a huge breath of “thank gawd you deposed our leaders!”, there’d be bitter fighting for years over it.
This is a botched war. We’re stuck in another permanent police action in a country we invaded with a terrible long term plan (we fired ordinance specifically at water treatment plants. While a good idea to force a surrender, a bad idea when you intend to occupy and rebuild), our troops are spending far more than their initial commitments over there, they’re poorly equipped and poorly trained for urban warfare, and we’ve got a huge problem with sexual assault by our own troops against our own troops.
Basically, the invasion? Nearly flawless. We only hit one unexpected bit with a force we weren’t prepared for. The intel leading to the invasion: Still no WMDs. We’ve just changed why we invaded. Now it’s human rights violations, though that wasn’t even kind of the pitch used to sell the invasion. Occupation? We’ve sucked at that hard. More losses during the occupation than the invasion. What was sold as a short and cheap war is a long and brutal conflict. Human rights violations on our side of the fence as well, accusations over the whole sole source contract to rebuild, terrible PR with the rest of the muslim world for the whole thing, the saddam trial is a joke, somehow we ended up with fewer combat ready iraqi police after three years than we had when we started the program, and we’re trying to bill it as flawless in this report? Our biggest issue in the whole thing was that we need to be friendlier with other countries so we can perform operations out of their turf? Seriously, there’s a LOT that’s gone terribly wrong, and this could be a learning experience to shape things up and do better if it ever comes up again. Instead it’s turned into patting themselves on the back and taking their successes and spinning them as things that need improvement, while totally ignoring all the actual flaws of the operations.
about 4 years ago
“It’ll all be over by Christmas” – Field Marshall Lord Haig, September 1914.
about 4 years ago
Kalain, well, it’s a matter of training. Take the British soldiers, who have training (and experience) of peacekeeping, and our record in Iraq compared…
(Given how common peacekeeping roles ARE these days…)
And hey, if you don’t want to do this rebuilding thing, there’s allways the UN.
about 4 years ago
kalain, it’s not that they’re lying to the public to cover something up or too stupid to know what’s happening. the pentagon decided years ago to drop conventional assets as much as possible in favor of more commando type units. despite the need for ground troops to occupy iraq, despite unwatched borders in iraq and afghanistan letting terrorists in, and despite ballooning budgets and questionable feasibility of the technologies that are supposed to replace our conventional forces, rumsfeld and the rest of the pentagon are pushing ‘transformation’. it’s not an assessment of the current war, it’s a sales pitch intended for the congressmen who would have to approve the abolition of our current military structure.
Goe, prefers winning the war sooner to losing the war later.
about 4 years ago
We’ve known the US armed forces are not built, equipped or prepared to hold ground. We knew that before we ever invaded. We’ve known for years that our huge weakness was urban warfare (hence all the R&D that’s been going into that area). But knowing that, we still stood up, said it wouldn’t take long at all, and we could do it easily.
Now yes, we have untrained infantry in iraq, and our holding ground is still abysmal. We weren’t prepared to do this, but did it anyways. The US armed forces have always been built to go in and take out a target and leave. We’ve become very very good at it.
But that report is not supposed to be “what we want to do in the next few years”, that report is legally mandated due to the iraq war. It was mandated because the Senate decided they were not getting any information on the progress of the war and occupation, or what the real issues were. What we want to do is part of the budget bills, we already know the army wants to refocus, and the air force wants newer long range intercepters.
I’m offended because I know a lot of these people serving, and they are stuck in a shitty situation with no end in sight, and the people running the show are so detached that they seem to think not addressing an issue will make it go away. The response to reports of rape of our own troops? A proposal to have a meeting to discuss the matter, and setting up a 9-5 (EST) hotline people can call. Brilliant.
And I’m fine with rebuilding if they admitted it up front. They told us a pricetag, that’s how they got approval to do this in the first place. A timeline and a price for the total invasion, rebuilding and occupation. They weren’t even CLOSE, and knew it when they origionally stated the goals. It was a huge lie just to get the public to agree with it until they were too far in to pull out. It offends me that even knowing all this, no one in any branch of government will suffer any form of punishment for lying to the public, and putting our armed forces in a situation they simply were not prepared to handle safely. If it was a need to invade due to a pressing threat to our safety, fine, we would have been pressed into it. But as it turns out, we had intel stating he wasn’t a threat, and Iran was a bigger issue. We now are in there, and see that he wasn’t a threat to us, and we could easily have waited until we were in a better position to do this without becoming bogged down in a war we aren’t built to fight.
Do we need to rebuild it? Sure. We blew it up. We should never have blown it up in the first place, but since we did, we’re rebuilding it. Should it be sole source? No, not really. I’ve done enough government purchasing to know that it requires a LOT of justification paperwork to go sole source on anything, to do so on such a large scale project is simply unheard of. This entire thing is full of stuff history books will be talking about for decades, once enough people are out of power that all the information is finally freely available. For now? Anything can just be buried under the power of a single party. Heck, just today: Secret wiretapping hearings? Nah, we’re cool, we’ll talk about it again later. Voted down.
The saddest thing about all this? I’m a conservative, and I’ve had enough of this mockery of a government. At this rate we’d be just as informed if they banned all press from entering DC.
about 4 years ago
the QDR is actually supposed to be future planning. it’s been congressionally mandated for a while. it’s not about iraq, or afghanistan, but future defense planning. it’s supposed to be the pentagon explaining it’s long term plans to show that it’s preparing to defend us against anything our enemies may throw against us in the foreseeable future.
“Title 10, Section 118 of the United States Code specifies: \’e2\’80\’9cThe Secretary of Defense shall every four years, during a year following a year evenly divisible by four, conduct a comprehensive examination (to be known as a ” quadrennial defense review”) of the national defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, budget plan, and other elements of the defense program and policies of the United States with a view toward determining and expressing the defense strategy of the United States and establishing a defense program for the next 20 years. Each such quadrennial defense review shall be conducted in consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.\’e2\’80\’9d” – from the website linked.
our infantry are trained as infantry. what they are not is mp’s, which is what almost every army unit being sent to iraq is expected to be doing, also part of the pentagon’s ‘transformation’. every soldier is no longer a specialized expert in his field, but a jack-of-all-trades and expected to be an expert in all of them.
almost every nco in the unit i was in had spent at least half their career in that type of unit. any problem we saw they had seen before and had seen solutions to before, so we had a vast body of knowledge based entirely on practical experience in addition to all other resources we had. when units are being converted from one type to another, that body of knowledge becomes useless. almost every experience will be new and solutions to those problems will not be instinctual to even the most experienced soldiers of the unit, unless they’ve previously done the same work.
i supported the war when it started and i support it now. i don’t support the long term strategies that let terrorist sponsoring states keep doing so until we get around to them.
Goe, was once told about killing prisoners by the guy who did it.
about 4 years ago
Fortunately, the army is keeping a tight rien on expenses:
http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2006020623?pt=0
about 4 years ago
But that’s just it, Iraq wasn’t sponsoring AQ, we’ve gone in and looked. Saddam hated them as much as we did, because they wanted Him out of power, too. We didn’t go into Iraq to stop terrorism, we went into Afghanistan for that. Our long term strategy has been almost reliably inaccurate intel reports. We thought they had WMD. We thought they were supporting AQ. We thought we knew about all their armed forces. We thought we knew HAMAS was going to lose the election. We’re basically wrong constantly. When we are right, we don’t even tell people (the CIA attacking one of AQ’s leaders in pakistan? Denied until we got proof we hit terrorists, then admitted to).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7336-2004Jul22.html
As everyone said before the iraq invasion: Iran’s the threat with terrorist links and a desire to burn things, Iraq is just petty and not worth the losses or money.
But you’re right, I have the QDR confused with the other report they’re supposed to be giving congress soon about what their plan in iraq actually is, and how it’s going. Though I stand by this being a worthless press piece that basically reads exactly like every employee yearly evaluation form I’ve ever read, where nothing bad has happened at all during a year, and they couldn’t do much of anything better. “I show up on time, but I could show up on time with doughnuts on fridays!” kind of thing in the Needs Improvement sections. Pure Fluff.
about 4 years ago
” We thought they had WMD. We thought they were supporting AQ. We thought we knew about all their armed forces.”
Yesterday on Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. You can read the highlights here. That page also has a link to the whole interview.
“In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Pillar accuses the Bush administration of “cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to match its political aims. The result, Pillar says, is that data was emphasized that would help justify a decision the White House had already reached: To invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein.”
It’s no so much that our intelligence was wrong pre-Iraq invasion but that only the intelligence that justified the decision that was already made was used. This seems very ass backwards to me.
about 4 years ago
Kalain says:
At this rate we\’e2\’80\’99d be just as informed if they banned all press from entering DC
Uhm, your whole comment was about how the politiicans have really lied to the press. Granted the press did not do a lot of digging and was quite happily regurgitating what the government was spewing, but considering it was the government who originally put out the false info how did the press become the bad guy here?
about 4 years ago
That wasn’t a comment about the press being bad, it was a comment about the information being given to the press is just as bad as if nothing was being given to them.
about 4 years ago
the press did quite a lot of digging. in fact, a very strong argument has already been made elsewhere that we’ve already found chemical weapon stockpiles inside iraq.
“Many times, we found huge drums of cyclosarin-based “pesticides” hidden in camouflaged ammunition bunkers… and many times we found empty chemical rockets and artillery shells, often at the same ammo dumps. But evidently, that doesn’t constitute chemical weapons according to the ISG. But if Hussein’s regime had actually poured the first into the second, then and only then would they be defined as chemical weapons.”
http://biglizards.net/blog/archives/2005/11/weapon_of_mass.html
the cia has been, since the start of the war, pissed off that they are not the main fighting force. they want cia commando teams hunting down the terrorists and didn’t want the department of defense involved.
as far as the al qaeda-iraq connection…
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092503F
but then, saddam had more open links to other terrorist groups, but they must be harmless and not worth worrying about until they kill a few thousand americans, right?
far from not digging, cnn bent over backwards to help saddam bury evidence against him.
http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/stories/storyReader$1991
Goe, because there’s more to this than meets the eye.
about 4 years ago
Oddly, I can’t find any of the transcripts those blogs are talking about, as far as the whole “pesticides! weapons! omg!”. We’ve founds lots of stuff that wasn’t banned explicitly as far as WMDs were concerned. Iraq was guilty of plenty of violations (long range attack drones, long range missiles, owning mobile weapons labs they said they destroyed), but no actual weapons, and no real evidence the mobile labs had been used since they were decommissioned post first war. The news isn’t covering it because it’s a conspiracy? What? Of all the bootlickers, do you really think FOX wouldn’t have a segment on weapons of mass destruction being found? At the very least Orielly? Seriously, those aren’t liberal media, those are people who are digging left and right to PROVE the administration is flawless, they’d have covered this left right and forward if there was anything to it.
Anyways, the CIA has flat out stated “dur, wait, he wasn’t in cahoots with AQ”: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9831216/site/newsweek
Left and right, the evidence that they did anything but go “hey, support us” “no” “please?” “no” is coming out, and it’s pretty obvious now that we were looking for something that wasn’t there.
The last link.. coverup? The basic concept of it was that Saddam was a terrible person. Nobody’s going to deny that and paint him as some civil rights leader. But he wasn’t supporting the terrorists who attacked us, and he wasn’t stockpiling WMDs to use against us. He was a brutal dictator, but so are plenty of other people. We invaded iraq under false pretenses, and that should bother people. If they sold the war from the start as “dude’s a jerk, we’re taking him out”, I’d not be nearly as pissed off. I mind when good friends die because of a lie.
about 4 years ago
if they had said \’e2\’80\’9cdude\’e2\’80\’99s a jerk, we\’e2\’80\’99re taking him out\’e2\’80\’9d you’d probably complain just as much. insofar as no connection existing between iraq and al qaeda, these are from the tcs link i provided above.
* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.
* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddams hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.
* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam’s son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddams mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraqs mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is “thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq,” the Guardian reported.
* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Janes Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Janes reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaedas No. 2 man.
* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan — who is charged by a Spanish court with being “directly involved with the preparation and planning” of the Sept. 11 attacks — that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his “al Qaeda nom de guerre,” Londons Independent reports.
* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddams son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawis Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawis cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.
plus, the clinton administration acted on intelligence linking al qaeda and iraq before the wtc attacks.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/527uwabl.asp?pg=1
” “It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.’”
according to the brits… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3892809.stm
“British intelligence on the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger was “credible”. There was not conclusive evidence Iraq actually purchased the material, nor did the government make that claim.”
and we know from the kay report that despite his claims of not finding any wmd’s in iraq, he found mountains of stuff indicating that they were making wmd’s out of things they knew we weren’t looking for.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/david_kay_10022003.html
” New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.”
” Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.”
but of course, you have a reason that the iraqi army wanted to _camoflauge_ vast amounts of _highly toxic_ pesticides next to chemical weapons warheads in their ammunition dumps.
Goe, doesn’t store cyclosarin around his house.
about 4 years ago
Gosh, where to start. How about here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3717024.stm
Or here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html
The second one in particular indicates that while Bin Laden was interested in getting aid from Iraq and tried several times to do so, there’s was never any credible evidence of Iraqi support for Al-Qaeda. (Although there’d be a great deal of credible evidence for the proposition that WE were behind 9/11, based on documented meetings with Al-Qaeda and funding for Osama Bin Laden. I notice we’re not trying to justify invading ourselves.)
The WMD thing – read the Duelfer report, or anything since. While it’s probable Hussein might have eventually tried to build up a stockpile of WMDs again, there’s no evidence at all he’d done so before we invaded. Quoting David Kay on the subject is slightly ironic, given that a year after he gave that testimony he was one of the loudest voices calling for the Bush administration to admit there had never been any WMDs.
about 4 years ago
both kay and duelfer were appointed to find wmd’s at the behest of organizations that denied the existence of wmd’s and wmd programs. even though they claim that cyclosporin is a harmless pesticide, they had to admit the existence of the programs that produced it. links between al qaeda and iraq are well documented and have been referred to above and will not be repeated for those incapable of using the scroll bar. iraq was not a direct contributor to the wtc attacks, but the bush administration never claimed that they were but that does not negate their pre-existing relationship with al qaeda. according to the duelfer report, all of iraq’s chemical and biological weapons were destroyed in 1991, which doesn’t explain the chemical and biological weapons duelfer admits to having found, nor does it account for the recordings of saddam discussing in 1995 what steps should be taken to hide his wmd’s and their associated development programs.
Goe, because all is not right in whoville.
about 4 years ago
So I guess that the reason our troops couldn’t find these WMD when they werer looking for them was that their view was blocked by the throngs of cheering Iraqis lining the roadside.
Have another glass of that koolaid.
Evangolis, who thought the war was a bad mistake even when everyone expected to find WMD, and now thinks it was a bad mistake whose execution was horribly bungled at the very top, and as a result has damaged our soldiers, our military, and our country.
about 4 years ago
in karbala, locals led u.s. soldiers to a yard where they said wmd’s were buried. soldiers and accompanying reporters fell ill, tests came up positive for nerve gas, they were treated accordingly. according to the isg, there was nothing dangerous there.
Goe, mmm… lunch.
about 4 years ago
Americans should be proud that no WMDs were found. Most countries would have found WMDs even if they had to ship them in with the attack forces.
about 4 years ago
but would that be such a bad policy?
“North Korea, want more nuclear weapons? CATCH!”
Goe, can see the upside.
about 4 years ago
I guess I’ve got the answer to the question I was going to ask, which was, ‘Why do some still try to justify the pre-war intelligence, when doing so only reminds the majority of an embarrassing and very public screw up?’ The picture I, and I think most Americans had of Iraq was as some sort of Arsenal of Terrorism (well, I never bought the AQ link, Saddam is too arrogant to play with others, but I expected the President knew what he was saying). What we have found is more like the Junkyard of Dictatorship. Sure, this is embarrassing to those commentators and officials who predicted the former, but if people didn’t defend the idea still, it would fade to the old news it is.
But the last two responses make me realize why the failure of our intelligence can’t be left alone by the neocons and thier fellow travellers. When I think about why the administration didn’t lie about finding WMDs when it has played fast and loose with truth on every front, the suspicion grows on me that they weren’t so much honest, as just too slow to realize they were wrong in time to cover it up.
And while the idea of unleashing our nuclear arsenal might seem appealing to some who hope that it would be more effective than our overstretched conventional forces, the fact remains that even with atomic weapons, some targeting information is useful. Blowing up starving North Korean peasants would be nothing more than valuable propaganda to Kim Il Jung. Crippling North Korea’s economy is pretty much redundant. The environmental impact would be of more concern to North Korea’s neighbors than it’s rulers.
And thus the reason that the WMD intell issue still remains. If we couldn’t trust this administration to have good intelligence then, why should we trust them now? And if we can’t trust thier intelligence, how can we trust them to effectively use the powers they wield in our name?
about 4 years ago
except that you’re making some inaccurate assumptions. iraq had chemical weapons through at least the mid 90′s, probably much later and nobody knows what happened to them. both the kay and duefler reports admit that iraq had highly active development programs so that they could mass-produce chemical and biological weapons as soon as they could get away with it. they were actively trading with other countries for wmd materials (they bought nuke plans from pakistan and were shopping around for more). only syria and iran came as close to funding of terrorist organizations as iraq.
Goe, not even touching the whole ‘neocon’ conspiracy insanity.