re: "A sure sign the wars are ending..."

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! has observed signs of increased garrisonification within the U.S. Army.

Money quote(s):

"A sure sign the wars are ending... ...is the Sergeant Major of the Army glowering menacingly from the cover of the Army Times saying "Lose weight or get out!""

&

"Heh. Anybody remember the challenges to discharges under AR 600-9, when the pencil-necked sunken-chested generals and their puppeteers the Sergeants Major solemnly intoned "Soldiers must be fit and able to fight on a moment's notice. It is crucial we have this tool to remove the unfit and protect the readiness of the force, which must be able to go to war from a standing start." Or words to that effect."

&

"What was about the first thing the Army did on September 12, 2001? Suspend discharges under AR600-9. But wait - I thought widebodies were a liability in an Army that has to go to war from a standing start...

Can't up the PT standards too much. We'd start losing pretty people, while the stout (not the obese, just the stout ones) would breeze by. Can't have that. Because we're far more concerned about looking pretty as we start our return to a garrison mentality, and it's emphasis on the appearance of discipline." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

The side with the prettiest uniforms always loses. That's a military axiom.

There should probably be a corollary to that regarding soldiers who look pretty.

Bottom line: War isn't about running in unit formation with guidons flapping in the breeze. While fitness is certainly an issue, there's always going to be a need for some beefy guys who can pick up and move some heavy stuff. War stuff. Stuff like heavy machine guns, vehicle parts, and ammunition.

Because there's no such thing as too much ammunition.

"You'll know it's really on if they go back to smooth leather boots.

Courtney Massengale is stirring, brushing the lint off his nicely tailored, neatly pressed (and lightly starched) uniform, getting ready to assert himself as Sam Damon gets shoved into advisory duty somewhere."

No extra credit for those who get the "Once An Eagle" references; it's not like it hasn't been on the Army's reading lists for years.

11/22

re: "Meanwhile, in other news..."

Bill at Castle Argghhh! ("just retired warriors and fellow-travelers") had some interesting news awhile back.

Money quote(s):

"Iran got tired of just shelling Iraqi Kurds and launched a raid into the area around Suleymania (S'leymani, if you'd prefer it in Kurmanji). The Revolutionary Guards evidently got their butts kicked good -- not surprising, since we've been training the Kurds since '03, at least. The RG's target was one of the towns where a lot of Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK) members make their home, because PJAK openly sides with Iranian Kurds agitating for an autonomous homeland in Iran. In what would normally be a puzzling move, in 2009 the Treasury Department declared the PJAK a terrorist organization -- right before Obie's "peace overtures" to Tehran. Got that? The *Treasury* Department -- not the State Department, and not the Justice Department, and not in coordination with either -- made that call, evidently based on an *Iranian* TV newscast linking PJAK with the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK)." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

7/20

re: "I remember Carter's Army"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! reminds us of the bad-old-days (before the Reagan build-up).

Money quote(s):

"We could probably scare the rest of you for hours with tales of how over 50% of our equipment was deadlined because there was no money in the budget for parts, maybe 30% of the remainder was parked in the Motor Pool because there was no money in the budget to pay for fuel for them, but it didn't matter much that we couldn't drive them to the training areas, because there was no money in the budget to pay for training ammo."

Yours Truly recalls how things improved as resources began to trickle down to the troop level during the early years of the Reagan administration, and as how things dried up again during the Clinton years.

"A reporter interviewing the commander of NATO's land forces asked him what equipment the Sovs would need to reach the English Channel if they decided to crash through Fulda, and he answered, "Shoes."

Carter's military, not just Carter's Army, was hollower than the Keebler elves' tree, and we all knew it. It still amazes me is that enough of us were yet willing to fight World War III if it happened..."

We happy few.

re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 3]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! finishes off the Big Lie about Iraq's WMD.

Money quote(s):

"Right after we captured Baghdad, there were a *lot* of PAO-type pix appearing in SIPRNET mail to various units (all combat arms outfits, as far as I could tell), showing US and Iraqi equipment, battlefield shots of blown-up tanks and people, etc., and some stuff highlighting the technology we used. Our S-2 knew I'd think that was real neat, so he called me in to show me. Among the goodies were two AWACS radar screenshots labeled "Iraqi truck convoys converging on Syria" -- lines of little glowing dots on the highways heading north, then turning northwest. They gave a timeline, but all I remember was it happened the night before we jumped.

Next day, there was a recall of the mail with the pix, citing OPSEC violations on the AWACS pix because they showed US positions -- bear in mind that the pix were a full week old, and that US units had already reached Baghdad by the time they were released. Our S-2, being a good S-2, promptly deleted the stuff without a thought. So did everybody else, as far as I can determine, including the military intel types OCONUS with SIPRNET access. Later, I heard the oblique AWACS screenshots were compared with satellite overhead photos and were matched to a gnat's eyelash.

Some time later, the Dems in Congress began screaming that Bush was a war criminal because we hadn't found Saddam's WMD -- we had found a lot of WMD and WMD-related stuff, but the Dems kept screaming "That's not the WMD Bush said they had."

Which morphed into the pre-election Talking/Screaming Point “We went to war in Iraq for a lie, because there were no WMD!” that continues to this day.

Now, let’s recap.

Did we find chemical weapons that Saddam had hidden from the UN inspectors? Yup.

Did we find biological warfare labs and delivery systems? Yup.

Two out of three, so far, and either one standing alone exposes “There were no WMD” as a lie."

It helps if you have no real understanding of the meaning of WMD in the first place. Then it's easier to be that stupid. (Ignorance is like that.)

That being said, I never saw any of that sort of "take." But then I didn't see much else in that line of intelligence collection: as intelligence collectors, we were just too far down in the weeds ourselves.

"Did we find a nuclear weapons program? Well, yes and no.

Yes, we found the evidence, but was it an ongoing program? Saddam himself lied about stopping and starting so often, that, if it wasn’t ongoing during the weeks before the invasion – and Saddam *knew* it was on the way -- chances are very good that he would have cranked it up again had we *not* jumped in.

Was the program stolen from under our noses while we were in the process of restoring some semblance of normalcy to Iraq?

Or was it just on hiatus until Saddam – or his designated heir – could open up for business in a new location? *Something* was on the convoys going into Syria, which the Iraqis, sources in at least two of Iraq’s neighbors, and the CIA's ace advisor have confirmed."

Bill then goes on to explain some basic facts about the party politics of Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria (which remains true today).

He concludes:

"Dick Cheney had the pix, he had the background info, he had the ear of the President, and he had enough personal authority to release them to shut the Dems up.

Those of us who knew about the pix kept expecting a dog-and-pony show from the White House which would stop this particular Big Lie in its tracks and reveal the Dems for what they were.

Any day, now... any day.

When he was asked (in 2010) why he didn't at least advise GWB to go public with the pix and their probable significance, Cheney just blew the question off, and said "we had other concerns at the time."

Swell. Thanks so much for being midwife to this particular Big Lie, Dick -- you gave us Barack Obama in 2008 and the resulting cascade of Big Lies we've been bombarded with ever since."

This is the most original reason for disliking Dick Cheney I've ever read. It bears thinking upon.

re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 2]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! revisits a personal pet peevasaurus (in other words, a Jurassic peeve of brobdingnagian proportions) of mine.

Money quote(s):

"(W)hat were some of the WMDs we found?

Well, for starters, we found 550 long tons of unrefined yellowcake (for the metrically-impaired, that’s 1,212,541 pounds of the stuff Joe Wilson *said* Saddam had no interest in acquiring). The Dems squeaked that it didn’t count, because Saddam had no centrifuges to use in enriching it to weapons grade – and then when we found the centrifuges, they squawked that the centrifuges (the exact same model Siemens centrifuge Iran used at Natanz to enrich its uranium, by the way) were for pharmaceutical purposes – even though they were found buried in the compound of the chief of Saddam’s nuke program.

By the way, the 606 US tons of yellowcake remained stockpiled in Iraq for anyone curious enough to want to look at it until 2008, when it was quietly shipped to Canada for refining." (Bold type added for emphasis. - CAA)

This is part of the "moving the goal posts" strategy of the previous administration's enemies.

Check out some of what the ISG found. Scary stuff.

"(T)hen the Dems changed “Where are the WMDs?” to “Those aren’t the WMDs we’re looking for!”Well, all righty, then, folks, just what *are* the WMDs you’re looking for?They wouldn’t say – they just kept repeating that, whatever we found, it wasn’t what they were looking for, and their Greek chorus in the MSM dutifully echoed them without even pausing for breath."

One-word snip.

"Now, exactly what were the WMDs that the Dems were looking for? Nobody’s saying, but the answer may lie in what happened during the countdown to the invasion. "

Stay tuned for the next installment.

re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 1]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! takes on a Big Lie.

Money quote(s):

"(O)ne of the most effective techniques the losers use in their all-consuming scramble to displace the current winners (or to retain their power as current winners -- but regardless of whether they're the Outs or the Ins, they're still losers) is the Big Lie."

Be sure to read the part where he explains where Cloward and Piven sourced this technique.

"There’s been one particular Big Lie going around that’s now so entrenched that even people who know better are accepting it as truth, and I got so tired of correcting individuals who spouted it that I promised myself I’d go full auto the next time I heard it.

Yesterday, I heard it – “We went to war in Iraq for a lie, because there were no WMD.”

Now, let’s start with the basics. WMD is an acronym for the old Soviet term for nukes (“Weapons of Mass Destruction”), which they distinguished from chem and bio agents (“Weapons of Mass Casualties”), while we lumped everything together, first under the acronym CBR (“Chemical, Biological, Radiological”) and later under NBC (“Nuclear, Biological, Chemical”). Somehow, probably because the boffins in the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace thought it was cool to use Sov terms for everything, WMD replaced NBC in MilSpeak, and the civilians in 1600 Pennsy thought it was cool to sprinkle their public pronouncements with MilSpeak terms (thus accruing Warrior Status Points without the onus of actually having to do, like, Warrior Stuff), WMD morphed into meaning *all* classes of unconventional weaponry, not merely nukes. The Russians are still pretty amused at that, by the way.

So, because Saddam had chemical weaponry and had a history of using them on his enemies, and because he let it be known that his bug guys were working on weaponizing germs of varying nastiness, and because he had a known on-again, off-again nuclear program, politicians who wanted to be in with the cool kids began referring to “Saddam’s WMD.” And they referred to them a lot – all through the ‘90s (and as late as 2003), every Democrat who got face time with a microphone talked about Saddam’s WMD and how unacceptable the situation was.

After the novelty of having waxed a modern army (albeit one with a thoroughly incompetent C-in-C) in a few days wore off, the Dems suddenly realized that George W. Bush had attained rock star status in the eyes of the voters. They panicked, and seized on the fact that Saddam hadn’t hit us with anything unconventional as the genesis of a new talking point for the 2004 election campaign.

“Where are the WMDs?”

They demanded that the troops stop whatever they happened to be doing and scour Iraq until they found Saddam’s stash."

To be fair, although WMD were connected with some of the Iraq War Resolution's 23 writs, they were the ones you heard the most about during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And not just the media, actual Administration spokesmen and high officials kept beating this drum.

"To be continued…]"

re: "The world turned upside down."

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! is getting schooled (as well as sharing lessons learned).

Money quote(s):

"I'm at a conference this week, where we're discussing the the range of tools under development for use in certain aspects of analysis of the current state of play in warfare as conducted by the West these days."

Sounds painful. Mainly because I know exactly the sort of toolkit he's talking about.

"(O)ne thing you have to remember when you fight an optional war - don't be surprised if the *other* guy sees it as an existential war, and fights it to the knife - when your own objectives and sensitivities won't allow you to fight it like that."

That bad old enemy keeps interfering with my well-laid plans. No fair!

re: "Wikileaks"

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! gives a pretty professional assessment.

Money quote(s):

"I for one, am not stunned by what PFC Manning managed to get access to, as anyone with a modicum of ability with access to the SIPRnet can attest. The goodness from this will probably be quicker tightening of security within the classified networks, by the expanded institution of some simple-to-implement checks on the "need-to-know" side of things.

Access to classified information has two parts - clearance at the appropriate level, *and* need-to-know. All "clearance" does is vet that your life-to-date has been examined and there are no huge warning signs that you aren't trustworthy to be considered for access to defined levels of information."

"Manning clearly had access to things he had no "need-to-know" reason to be accessing. For those who have been operating in that environment there has been steady and stuttering-but-inexorable movement to stitching up those seams, all tempered by a real desire to make information available to people who need it without going through a huge number of hoops to get it in a timely fashion in a time of war."

&

"It has been an interesting look into the State Department's world, and how things going on behind the scenes oft-times have little bearing to what's happening on the public side of things, as all governments have reason to present a public face that differs from the private. Sausage-making isn't pretty, but there didn't strike me that there was/were horrible revelations in there. More of it was along the lines of, "Yep, okay, that doesn't surprise me." and "People still don't get that some things should be said face-to-face and not in potentially record communications." But I don't believe that exposing what amounts to working papers is a good idea."

re: "No More Heroes? [David M - Thunder Run]"

The Denezins at Castle Argghhh! spank Andy Rooney.

Money quote(s):

"I’m not at all surprised my Mr. Rooney’s inability to find any heroes these days, since today’s heroes are fighting a war he would rather not acknowledge. Every day American men and women, the finest of our country, volunteer to put on the uniform of their country and step forward to shoulder a task that most American’s would rather not exist, by going to war at the behest of their country."

re: "H&I Fires* 03 March 2009"

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! opines on the president's birth certificate.

Money quote(s):

"I understand not wanting to knuckle under to the Liliputians picking at your cuffs, especially when there are those who say the issue has been resolved. But there is still a question, and one wonders if the concern about precedent-setting doesn't rather undermine things more when the answer seems simple enough - show the document publicly."

re: "Foggy Headed - Foggy Bottom"

Boquisucio at Castle Argghhh! slings an arrow our way.

re: "Train as you fight. Fight as you train."

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! mentions something I've experienced myself, when deployed with Coalition forces equipped with ex-Soviet vehicles and armor (see the bottom quote below).

Money quote(s):

"One of the lessons learned and relearned by armies throughout history is that if you train against your own troops using your own tactics... you get really good at fighting yourself. Which, absent civil wars, you just don't do very often.

Plus, if you don't give your tactical intel guys realistic training, they tend to give unrealistic assessments, and don't have skills, like order of battle analysis, that would be nice to have."

"(T)he State Department, peaceniks, and some foreign nations get, well, downright cranky when you just throw some real, sovereign nation out there as the enemy you train against."

&

"(M)y trigger finger got all itchy, in a "those were the days" kind of reverie."