From a brave but frustrated front-line infantry leader. Shades of SLA Marshall!
as the Army stands down from conflict life will get very dull……
Yeah I am dreading that and honestly I LOVE the Army. It's always the politics. Just like the article I read on MSNBC talking about the new strategy is to do “surgical strikes”. One of my favorite quotes ever is “Bombing from a B-52 is very effective. The bombs always hit the ground.” I just think it is funny when you blow up a mud hut in some shit hole country people think it makes a difference. It doesn't and at the end of a week the mud hut is back and it's back to whatever it was doing before it
was destroyed. Bombardment denies enemy the terrain only as long as stuff is exploding. Once the explosions stop anybody can walk through there. That is why nothing has ever beat the infantryman. It's why the Infantry has been around since the dawn of armies.
People are complaining about the cost of the wars and here again it's Politics. Congressman and Senators
and the general public forcing equipment training and standards onto the military that is may not necessarily need or want. We have cooks in the army we don't need the KBR chow-halls. I have two good legs and feet I
don't need a truck most of the time. I definitely don't want these MRAP's that I am being FORCED to use. Give me a soft skin Humvee a mission, beans and bullets and look see what I can do. Body armor, armored vehicles and these chu's while yes they are nice they aren't necessary. Somewhere though somebody thought it should be the rule and not the exception and here we are trillions of dollars later and for what. I don't really blame
army leadership as much as politics. I don't mean politicians either although they are the cause of a lot of this pain. Family and friends back home, bystanders and people who think their opinion should matter are
complaining that people are dying in Humvee's and we need something better. Hence the MRAP. People wanna know why the military doesn't have body armor and hell cops do. Cops don't carry near the gear and ride
around on motorcycles or in cars. Take away some of my crap and let me walk, I won't get blown up as much cause I am not walking on a road, I will be able to think clearer because I am not so miserable and let me
kill the bad guys so I feel there is a purpose. To the victor goes the spoils, but since when is the spoils of war rebuilding the losers country then leaving it???
Phi Beta Iota: DefDog refers to Review (Guest): The Soldier’s Load and the Mobility of a Nation. The USA does not have light infantry. As MajGen Bob Scales has observed, we spend 1% of the budget on the 4% of the force that takes 80% of the casualties.
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