Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops

[Japher]

the problem with the other thread was that it was Sava'd from the get go... can't have that now can we

[Panag]

Originally posted by gopher
Oh great Ming, why did you delete the other thread? 80% of it was devoted to biological warfare talk.

hi ,

well maybe it could go in its own separate thread , ......


have a nice day


P.S. the washington post is used in our parts of the world to clean potatoes on

[Panag]

Originally posted by gopher
All right! A (somewhat) branching thread! Kick ass!

As for you, panag, where did you hear this?

Virtually all sources say that besides the two official sources, only NK and Iraq.

Read it here , its the washington post.

hi ,

if they would have only read Ken's book , ......


its completely edited , .....


the dc post shall now serve as boot cleaner


have a nice day

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Spiffor
Slowwhand, MtG or The Diplomat must have missed that post, so I'll quote it again:

Thanks.

I was so upset about the issue I had to go out to Starbucks and grab a frappucino.

I really didn't bother to reply because it's a silly-assed comparison, no offense. Why not compare it to nuking Baghdad or Washinton DC?

Chemical agents are area effect weapons, meant to be employed against a strategic area (supply depot, airfield), and they're also internationally banned. On the other side of the question, it seems like you're quibbling over whether we should have killed them with a larger concentration of conventional high explosive ordnance, or just killed them the way we did.

RPG's are now popular as anti-infantry weapons, as a sort of poor man's artillery. One of the RPG casualties we took in Somalia lost an arm, a leg, was blinded and made deaf by the concussion effects from the blast, and had 2nd degree burns over 30% of his body.

What do you think happens when a tank or an IFV gets fatally hit? An aircraft gets hit by a SAM? Burn injuries and deaths due to burn injuries are very common in modern war. Is that particularly worse than being gutted by a bayonet and lying in the sun all day, a la the Napoleonic wars? Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but at least we end wars quickly nowadays, so the overall numbers of casualties are far less.

In planning for war, we expect the enemy to employ every means at his disposal, hence a lot of concern going into Iraq about suiting up and being prepared for possible gas attacks. We make a priority of defending against the threat, and of eliminating the potential threat through massive application of force and mobility.

Do we like our buddies getting killed? Obviously not. Do we like our own side getting killed? Aside from the very occasional chicken**** who might have it coming, obviously not. But as soldiers, we're engaged in the business of killing, and so is our enemy. The end result of who walks away and who doesn't is determined by how well we do our jobs and prevent the other guys from doing theirs, end of story.

[Panag]

Washington's Pax Americana smacks of Roman power game

The Australian August 04, 2003

Washington's Pax Americana smacks of Roman power game

In-Depth Coverage

By Paul Kennedy

The US emphatically denies it has worldwide imperial ambitions, but the global spread of its military commitments suggests otherwise, writes Paul Kennedy

THERE is a cunning after-dinner board game called SPQR which involves the defence of the Roman Empire at its height. The board is a map of Europe and the Mediterranean, showing Roman cities and ports and the military roads and the sea lanes between them. The game involves the "senators and populace" moving selected Roman legions (there were 27 of them in, say, 80AD) along those internal lines in response to new threats, whether they come from Syria, Scotland or the Danube.

There were few places along the borders of the empire where one legion could not reinforce another within 10 days' march -- which was just as well, since Rome's expansion had given it many enemies, and a legion that was based in Sicily one year might find itself in the north of England the next, guarding Hadrian's Wall.

I thought of SPQR while reading Where Are the Legions? Global Deployments of US Forces, published by Global Security, the nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research group based outside Washington (https://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...eployments.htm). The message is clear, and very disturbing: there may not be many US troops coming home soon, perhaps not for a long time.

Washington now has military forces in about 130 countries, fighting in some of them, peacekeeping and training foreign military units in others. You can hear George Washington turning in his grave.

To be sure, the US has had standing military commitments abroad since the end of the World War II -- the occupations of Germany and Japan, the Korean War and the global rivalry with the Soviet Union made sure of that.

But when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it was generally assumed things would be different. Alas, that simply is not so. The fight against al-Qa'ida, the war and guerrilla resistance in Iraq, the implosion of Liberia, the continued unrest in Afghanistan, instability on the Korean peninsula and the need to reassure Japan of a strong US presence in the western Pacific have all conspired against a draw-down of US forces in the far corners of the globe. On the contrary, they have very much been drawn up.

Using official statistics, the editors at Global Security report there are 155 combat battalions in the US army. Before October 2001, only 17 of those were deployed on active combat service, in Kosovo and a few other hotspots (garrison deployment in Germany and Japan is not regarded as "active combat" service). Today, that figure stands at 98 combat battalions deployed in active areas.

Even a non-military expert can see this is an impossibly high number to sustain over the longer term, which is why, in addition to the 255,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guard forces deployed in combat and peacekeeping missions abroad, the US has sent another 136,000 troops from the National Guard and Reserves.

Most of the US carrier fleet are now back in their bases, being refitted after the defeat of Saddam Hussein, but Washington still has 40,000 sailors afloat and on mission. Meanwhile, the US generals are asking for more troop deployments in Iraq, and the Pentagon has just diverted three warships to the coast of Liberia. The US Defence Department now has to play a real-life game of SPQR.

These are not comfortable facts, and they should surely be giving US congressional representatives cause for thought. It is true the Pentagon is putting immense pressure on any country that counts itself a friend of Washington to send forces to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia, but the results so far are unspectacular.

Really, the only ground troops with heft and logistical capacity are the British, and, given all their other peacekeeping commitments -- from the Balkans to Sierra Leone -- they are probably more overstretched than the US is. Poland has assumed responsibility for running a relatively quiet (so far) zone in Iraq. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, Washington had to go to 22 countries to drum up the 9000 troops for that zone, and they will rely heavily on US technical support to function at all.

You wonder what utility Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz really accord a battalion of Latvian grenadiers in central Iraq. And what happens when they become the targets of grenade attacks?

Militarily -- and let's forget for a moment the debate about whether the US should have gone into these countries in the first place -- these awkward facts point to two equally awkward conclusions:

First, given the military overstretch, the US needs a few more heavy hitters, along with the British. It needs armies with substantial punch that could send 25,000 troops to southwest Asia. But of the 190 national armies of the world, you can count substantial ones on the fingers of one hand. Israel can't play, China and Taiwan won't play. South Korea is pinned down at home and remains a drain on US troop deployments. Japan is too psychologically and constitutionally restricted. A Pakistani presence alongside the US in Iraq might cause massive internal convulsions. A large Turkish contingent would cause a retaliatory Kurdish uprising.

This leaves India, Russia, France and Germany, and perhaps Italy, but four of those five opposed the war on Iraq in the first place, and if the US needs them now, there will be a price to pay. This is as obvious today as it should have been last September. Of course, the US can always "go it alone", but it does so at some cost.

Second, the US miliary services, and the army in particular, must come up with some long-term rotation scheme. They may have to move to a sort of Cardwell System, which was devised in the late 19th century by the then British secretary for war, Edward Cardwell, to deal with the constant calls on troops to serve abroad. One battalion of the British regiment was rotated out, perhaps to Afghanistan or Mesopotamia, for two or three years, the second battalion stayed home in the regimental barracks, recruiting fresh volunteers until its turn came to go abroad.

The system worked, just as the SPQR system worked, because both combined regular rotation (helping troop morale) and strategic flexibility. Occasionally, there were horrible reverses: for the Romans in the German forests or the British in the Khyber Pass. But the structure was strong enough to allow for recovery, often for further advances. These were empires that were in it for the long haul.

Is this the US future -- to have its troops stationed for an undefined time on the Northwest Frontier or in a disease-ridden port in West Africa or some other outpost?

Washington frantically denies it has imperial ambitions, and I believe those denials to be sincere. But if the US increasingly looks like an empire, walks like an empire and quacks like an empire, perhaps it is becoming one just the same.

Paul Kennedy is a professor of history at Yale University and author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

[Imran Siddiqui]

as opposed to the whiny chickenchoker attitude from the handwringing Euro-lefty crowd?

as for "chickenhawks" you can kiss my size 11-EEE jump boots.

Hoo-ah!

See... I knew this would happen when you started using the term 'chickenhawk'. Sooner or later you'd get tagged with it, even if you served or didn't. Chris (ie, Yank) was called that recently, and now you, Mike (ie, Reb ) were just called it.

Unintended consequences...

[MichaeltheGreat]

What's especially funny is I didn't even support the war.

[Boris Godunov]

Can I just point out that these bombs are far nastier and deadlier than anything we've found in the Iraqi arsenal so far?

Even so, weren't we the ones who were supposedly afraid of them using nasty weapons on ourtroops, and made huge threats about the dire consequences if they did?

If dead is dead, how would the defending Iraqis using their non-existent WoMD on our invading soldiers be considered more objectionable than conventional ones?

[SlowwHand]

It was said there had been no terrorist attacks, prior to 9/11.
That's wrong.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Can I just point out that these bombs are far nastier and deadlier than anything we've found in the Iraqi arsenal so far?

All our aerial ordnance is nastier than what we've found so far, by definition, because Saddam's "air force" didn't fly a single sortie, and virtually all aerial ordnance is bigger than any artillery. Does that mean we should have sat our air force down, to make it more sporting? Or WTF was the point you were trying to make?

Even so, weren't we the ones who were supposedly afraid of them using nasty weapons on ourtroops, and made huge threats about the dire consequences if they did?

If dead is dead, how would the defending Iraqis using their non-existent WoMD on our invading soldiers be considered more objectionable than conventional ones?

So then why not nukes? Are you leftists routinely this dumb, that you can't understand the concept of scale, or do you just ignore it when it's inconvenient to your arguments?

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
All our aerial ordnance is nastier than what we've found so far, by definition, because Saddam's "air force" didn't fly a single sortie, and virtually all aerial ordnance is bigger than any artillery. Does that mean we should have sat our air force down, to make it more sporting? Or WTF was the point you were trying to make?

The point was that If Saddam was such a ****ing threat that war was necessary, but we were routinely *****-slapping his forces with stuff that he didn't even have the remotest chance of simulating in terms of power or effectiveness, why the hell am I supposed to believe he was such a threat that made the war necessary?

So then why not nukes? Are you leftists routinely this dumb, that you can't understand the concept of scale, or do you just ignore it when it's inconvenient to your arguments?

Again, you miss the point. We claim a moral high ground that if Saddam uses his alleged bio and chemical weapons on our troops, we'll consider it a war crime. Consider the acknowledged effectiveness of such weapons (which is low), and the observed extreme effectiveness of napalm, not to mention it's being essentially a chemical weapon, I have to wonder if such a stance wasn't a wee bit hypocritical. If dead is dead, it works that way for both sides. Saying we're gonna be pissed if he uses chemical weapons, and then we go and use a chemical weapon ourselves on Iraqi troops certainly sounds like hypocrisy to me.

Thanks for the "dumb" remark, but note my comments held no objection to killing enemy soldiers in war, to which you seem to think I am taking umbrage.

[Jon Miller]

people voted to make bio and chem weapons illegal

peopel have not voted to make napalm illegal

while you might think things should be different (and I concede that you might be right) it still doesn't stop the fact that it is the illegality of the use of bio and chem weapons that make their use a war crime

all of war is a 'crime', but in an attempt to make it a little less nasty, we have decided that a few crimes are worse than others

these include using bio and chem weapons

they do not include napalm

Jon Miller

[Dis]

Boris, if this was considered a banned weapon I would be inclined to agree with you.

But the article states this weapon is not illegal.

If you are that upset about it, make a petittion to make the use of napalm illegal.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
The point was that If Saddam was such a ****ing threat that war was necessary, but we were routinely *****-slapping his forces with stuff that he didn't even have the remotest chance of simulating in terms of power or effectiveness, why the hell am I supposed to believe he was such a threat that made the war necessary?

Apparently you missed all my prewar posts where I expressed my view that he was not an imminent enough threat to justify the required level of commitment of US forces? I don't believe the war was necessary, at the time it was fought. However, it was fought, so now we have to make the best of it, and carping about minor issues relating to ordnance selection is both trivial and non-productive.

Again, you miss the point. We claim a moral high ground that if Saddam uses his alleged bio and chemical weapons on our troops, we'll consider it a war crime. Consider the acknowledged effectiveness of such weapons (which is low), and the observed extreme effectiveness of napalm, not to mention it's being essentially a chemical weapon, I have to wonder if such a stance wasn't a wee bit hypocritical.

If you want to play semantic games, every weapon other than the bayonet or combat knife is a chemical weapon, because chemicals either propel it, or cause it to blow up. BCW is a violation of international convention, incendiaries are not.

WRT effectiveness, that's again a BS argument that doesn't consider scale. If you deliver 6 500 lb CW canisters with a mixture of GA and VX to that target, or 6 500 lb incendiary bombs, which do you think will be more "effective" in a 100 meter, 500 meter, 1 km, or 2 km radius?

In the immediate target area, overpressure FAEs, daisy cutters, some types of ground penetrating conventional ordnance, MOABs, or incendiaries would all be effective regarding the removal of enemy personnel from those positions. Most of those would cause more long term damage to the area than incendiaries.

And like I said in response to another post, what do you think happens when a tank or IFV is fatally hit?

Napalm does not meet the definition of a chemical weapon in the slightest. The definition of a chemical weapon is that it's effect on the human target is based upon the weapon being a reagent which induces or inhibits biochemical reactions within the target's body, or that the chemical agent itself is an area effect contact irritant with persistent effects (i.e. chlorine or phosgene gas)

The fact that something explodes or burns does not itself qualify, nor does the fact of incidental irritation due to products of combustion. Otherwise, nothing larger than a rifleman or machine gunner's full metal jacket bullet would be allowable, and that without tracers.

If dead is dead, it works that way for both sides. Saying we're gonna be pissed if he uses chemical weapons, and then we go and use a chemical weapon ourselves on Iraqi troops certainly sounds like hypocrisy to me.

Dead is dead applies to the individual killed. It doesn't speak to the scale of killing.

Thanks for the "dumb" remark, but note my comments held no objection to killing enemy soldiers in war, to which you seem to think I am taking umbrage.

You're welcome. What I considered dumb was the failure to consider scale of effect.

[Pekka]

Euros got rid off what? I know we have every single possible nasty chemical what we need and is out there.
Why? Because we research them, so we can protect ourselves against them. Like doing new chem suits and stuff like that. Gasses all kinds of nasty stuff, so we can make better gasmasks (ours are quite popular in the world btw). It is strictly for research though, but it's the real thing.

I just read from local military magazine, where there was an interview of a researcher in these places. He said that they are easy to be reproduced in very short time. SO what is the point? I don't think we're the only country doing it. We're all doing it. Canada is doing it. Sweden is doing it. Switzerland is doing it. Saddam even requested some stuff from us, Sweden and Finland a while ago before war started. For research purposes. So he can defend himself against chem attacks. Only exception is he didn't get it. Catch my drift? Everyone has everything.
Except maybe nukes.