-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Soldiers For The Truth Defending America Newsletter Copyright © 2001 Soldiers For The Truth Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Situation Report - 14 March 2001 "Searching for the Proper Defense Priorities" TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS SITREP From The President - 14 March 2001 Through Zman’s Gun Sight - Recognition For Combat Troops HACK’s Target For The Week - CIA Strikes Out Again The Big Picture: Article 1 - Rumsfeld: Iraqi Strikes Met Goal Article 2 - Bush Faces Tough Choices on Weapons Article 3 - Powell Pledges Troops for Balkans Voice of the Grunt: Article 4 - Readers Gun-sights: Iraq, A Convenient Little Conflict Article 5 - Transform Character First Article 6 - International Opinion: Canada’s Heroes Also Unrecognized Article 7 - Sisyphus Was The Spouse Of A Service Member Article 8 - SFTT Was Right – Training Base Is Breaking! Article 9 - Navy: We Don’t Act Like Animals Article 10 - Air Force: Dog & Pony Shows Aren’t Just Navy Specialties Article 11 - Very Few Really Want The Truth Article 12 - Gulf War Veterans March in London G.I. Humor: Article 13 - PFC To Be Chairman of JCS Medal of Honor: Article 14 - ROSE, GEORGE, China 1900 Admin / Log Net Editors Note - Article Submission - Contacts - Service Editors Subscribe and Unsubscribe Information Donations & Contributions Archives - Defending America Newsletter 1997 - 2001 Printer Friendly - Text Only Version SITREP: SITUATION REPORT: 14 MARCH 2001 A. Main topics: 1) Awards and Recognition 2) Leadership 3) Opinions 4) Training 5) Quality of Life B. HOT BUTTONS: * Better Comms!!! I think we’ve taken the initial hurdles and things are looking better. DON’T be afraid to come back up on the net again. Please note that I had to get a new and upgraded e-mail account. Send to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Questions for the troops: (1) Based on the latest developments, will the US be able to extricate itself from the Balkans within the next two years, as promised by the President? (2) Are things getting better in your units or are the old bureaucrats mounting a renewed defense? !!! Feel free to send me hot topics directly if you can’t get through the admin/log net – [EMAIL PROTECTED] Keep the mail coming!!! We won’t reveal your true identity unless you give us your approval. We know how vindictive the "system" is. * WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT 2000. EVERY DOLLAR MAKES A DIFFERENCE. THANK YOU to all SFTT warriors who are sending bucks for fuel ammo and beans. * How you can help: - DONATE HERE - !!! Credit Card donation via our WEBSITE at http://www.SFTT.org/donations.html !!! If you think we HIT a target, forward the newsletter to TV, radio and your local papers. YOU are the frontline recruiters and intel gatherers for SFTT. Check or Money order: Send to and make payable to: Soldiers For The Truth Foundation, PO Box 63840, Colorado Springs, CO 80962-3840. Important: Your donation is tax deductible! SFTT is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit educational foundation, IRS # 31-1592564. If you send us an E-MAIL address with your donation we can immediately mail you a RECEIPT. Multiple contributions: Please remind us when you submit your donation. We will send you a cumulative statement. Prepare for Action -- "Crew Ready! -- LOAD SABOT - DRIVER MOVE OUT!" R.W. Zimmermann President SFTT [EMAIL PROTECTED] Zman Through Zman’s Gun Sight Proper Recognition For Combat Troops Overdue By R.W. (Zimm) Zimmermann President, Soldiers For The Truth SFTT Dateline 14 March 2001 Once again, I’m baffled how single minded our military leaders wave off the request to recognize the tank troops for direct fire combat, with a combat armor badge, or CAB. Shockingly, the commander of the US Armor Center, Major General B.B. Bell voted against the badge for sensitivity reasons: "We all vowed not to penalize those who didn’t serve in war…the CAB could be divisive in the armor forces and create an impression and culture of ‘haves and have nots.’" Give me a break, general! With these statements, you might as well retire the armor branch motto, "the combat arm of decision," and paint all gun tubes pink. Not surprising, Major General Le Moyne, commander of the Infantry School reasserted that Infantry rules our Army: "The policy of only a Combat Infantryman’s Badge has worked for over 50 years, why change it now?" These guys don’t get it. The tank has been a decisive, deep-strike weapon since WWII. Unfortunately, in the US Army, armor wasn’t fully exploited, because most senior leaders continued to view it purely as an Infantry support branch. Thank goodness there were exceptions: George Patton, Maurice Rose of the 3rd Armored, John Woods of the 4th Armored Division, were students of Heinz Guderian, who understood that tanks when concentrated and striking deep against supply lines and communications centers, could quickly break enemy resistance. Unfortunately, our military history talks little of what our tankers endured when they put their thin front slopes against German Panthers and Tigers. When you read about the Bastogne stand you hear much about the courageous airborne grunts, but little of those who saved the Screaming Eagles’ tail feathers. It was the 4th Armored Division, with Creighton Abrams’ 37th tank battalion leading, who finally broke the siege. On the enemy side, the Panzer Corps quickly became an elite of handpicked and motivated professionals. To identify them and boost recruiting, German tankers wore black uniforms, with silver skulls and crossed bones, a reminder of the cavalry traditions of the Napoleonic wars. They also had a combat badge: The Panzerkampf Abzeichen. It was awarded for direct fire engagements and quickly became the trademark for motorized gunslingers like Captain Michael Wittmann, credited with 138 tank kills and the destruction of 132 anti tank guns. If there is one lesson we could learn from the Panzer forces, it is that they knew how to recognize their outstanding fighters, which still produced high volunteer numbers, even at a time when the war was hopelessly lost. In my 21 years in tanks, I always questioned why our armored force never outgrew the infantry support straight jacket. Even when we adopted the Air Land Battle concept in 1981, an Americanized version of Blitzkrieg, most of our senior commanders still missed the concept of driving concentrated armor thrusts deep into the enemy’s rear. During Desert Storm, when tanks and planes were credited with 90% of all battlefield kills, we never unleashed our tanks to rapidly close the bag around a fleeing enemy. Adhering to Infantry tactics, we stopped to deal with every small rifle squad and wasted precious time. It’s sad that the attitude of war as a protracted firepower slugfest and cautiously moving infantry action is totally ingrained in our tactical thinking. Hollywood also consistently over-glorifies commando actions, so that most folks and reporters believe that you can knock out heavy tanks with sticky sick bombs a la Private Ryan. In reality, a tank commander wouldn’t even feel the thing going off under him and the best way to deal with a nasty sniper is a big, fat main gun round into windows and church steeples, their likely hangouts. While we spend inordinate amounts of effort to preserve the Ranger beret, we should also recognize the tank troops who produce 75% of all ground combat power. Their firepower, mobility and protection remain important ingredients for victory and just one US tank platoon would have averted the ambush dilemma our Rangers faced in Somalia. Recognizing our combat troops is the right thing to do and will have positive impact on recruiting and retention. Should we also recognize other branches? Sure, guys like forward artillery observers and mine clearing engineers, should be eligible for combat medals. What stands in the way of recognizing exceptional and combat performance, is once again timid leadership, the "let’s all feel good about ourselves" kind, displayed by MG Bell and other entrenched bureaucrats, more worried about being popular than doing what’s right. © R.W. Zimmermann, LandserUSA [EMAIL PROTECTED] HACK HACK’s Target For The Week CIA Strikes Out Again By Col. David Hackworth In Kosovo, U.S. Army paratroopers are receiving and returning fire. Our guys are shooting made-in-the-USA M-16 rifles, and their opponents, Albanian extremists, are using ex-Soviet Union AK-47 assault rifles. So what's new? M-16s and AK-47s have been blasting each other for decades, and anyone familiar with Albanians and Serbians and the bloody history of ex-Yugoslavia would say, "What do you expect? Those crazies have been going at it with hot lead longer than the Hatfields and McCoys." What's new is that the AK-47s, the ammo and the wherewithal to field the Albanian army of insurgent thugs currently going up against our and other NATO troops were provided not by Russia or Red China or North Korea, but by the USA. Yes, American taxpayers paid for the bullets being used to shoot American soldiers! For months our CIA has secretly trained, funded and supplied former Kosovo Liberation Army rebels conducting a guerrilla campaign into southern Serbia to undermine former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic -- exactly the same kind of operation our spooks supported before and during the war against Serbia over Kosovo. European commanders in Kosovo are not only charging the CIA with playing footsie with the Albanian rebels. They're also claiming American commanders in Kosovo have deliberately looked the other way and allowed a steady flow of KLA rebels and CIA-provided arms and war-fighting material to slip across Kosovo's border. Last Sunday, Britain's Observer newspaper reported a European commander in Kosovo as saying: "The CIA has been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he's gone (and) the U.S. State Department seems incapable of reining in its bastard army." The angry NATO commander added: "Most of last year, there was a growing frustration with U.S. support for the radical Albanians. U.S. policy was and still is out of step with the other NATO allies." Now -- with CIA help -- the Kosovo Liberation Army rebels are attacking on two fronts: Southern Serbia and along the Macedonian border, where our paratroopers tangled with them last week. The attacks into Serbia could bring the Belgrade army back with a vengeance and restart the war in Kosovo. The Macedonian border fighting also could explode into an ethnic civil war inside of that country, which could be even more destructive than the 1999 Kosovo shootout. And meanwhile -- right in the middle of the killing field -- American soldiers are caught in a cross fire of our own making. Most military writers familiar with the centuries-old Albanian-Serb conflict predicted it would never go away when President Clinton first began talking about sticking our troops in those swamps. Many warned, "Don't go there." But our government seldom listens -- and rarely learns from past hard lessons. In the 1930s, because it was good for business, we sold scrap metal to Japan. The Japanese shot it back at us from 1941 to 1945 at places like Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. We've trained, supplied and armed bad guys from Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam to Saddam Hussein in Iraq to the KLA in Kosovo. Young Americans always end up downrange getting hammered by the very stuff we provided, with the folks we trained out there happily pulling the trigger. During the presidential campaign, George W. Bush questioned our operations in ex-Yugoslavia. Now that he's getting the inside scoop, hopefully he's realized that it's a mass of endless running sores. Six years after we went to Bosnia for only one year, we're still there -- and Kosovo looks like an even more open-ended and far more dangerous commitment. The president must put a muzzle on the CIA to stop it from supporting one of the most cutthroat gangs of terrorists in the world. Next he should turn the Yugoslavian mission over to our European allies. We've already spent too many lives and too many dollars on a land that Otto von Bismarck declared was not worth the bones of one Prussian soldier. It's Europe's back yard, not ours. And the perfect time to exit that snake pit is now. Our allies are so furious with American duplicity and stupidity, they'd probably be glad to see us go. Bill Clinton couldn't have staged a more typical exit strategy. David Hackworth's home page is at - http://www.hackworth.com Send mail to P.O. Box 5210, Greenwich, CT 06831 *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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