-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
February 6, 2002 Soldiers For The Truth (SFTT) Weekly Newsletter When we assumed the Soldier, We did not lay aside the Citizen. General George Washington, to the New York Legislature, 1775 In this week’s Issue of DefenseWatch: The Fog of War ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Editorial and Administrative Staff ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Ed Offley Editor, DefenseWatch Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] J. David Galland Deputy Editor, DefenseWatch Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] David H. Hackworth Senior Military Columnist Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chris Humphrey SFTT Webmaster Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Table of Contents Editor's Note: A New Kind of War, But the Same Old Fog, by Ed Offley Hack's Target for the Week: Anti-Terror Campaign Is No License to Steal Article 01 - Ten More Things I Do Not Know Or Understand, by Matthew Dodd Article 02 - Gender Equality Has Weakened, Paralyzed the Military, by Jon Barrett Article 03 - Tomorrow's Sub Fleet: The Non-nuclear Option, by Robert Williscroft Article 04 - The WMD Threat Against America Remains High, by Robert Koontz Article 05 - Slobodan Milosevic - Alone - Goes On Trial, by J. David Galland Article 06 - Editor's Note: Feedback Wanted Medal of Honor: Article 07 - Poynter, James I., Sgt. USMC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- FROM THE EDITOR: A New Kind of War, But the Same Old Fog ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- By Ed Offley The day after that fierce firefight between U.S. Special Operations commandos and armed Afghans in the village of Hazar Qadam on Jan. 23, a reporter for The Washington Post wrote, "The raids underscored how the war in Afghanistan is far from over as U.S. forces search for Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and Mohammad Omar, the head of the Taliban regime that sheltered the terrorist network. It suggested that U.S. troops could face combat there for months to come." It seemed so at the time: The raid reportedly led to the deaths of 18 Afghan fighters and the seizure of 27 prisoners with the combat injury to one American soldier. Well, two weeks having passed since that violent mission, we are learning that the Hazar Qadam incident - and an earlier U.S. air strike against a convoy suspected of carrying Taliban officials near Khost on Dec. 22 - produced an altogether different lesson for the United States, its allies and the fledgling Afghan government of interim leader Hamid Karzai: Our friends may be as treacherous and dangerous to American troops as our enemies. It now seems likely that the SOF commandos and U.S. fighter pilots and their forward air controllers were played for suckers by competing ethnic/political factions in the country. Following a week of stout insistence that the Jan. 23 commando raid had correctly targeted remnant Taliban fighters, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday formally acknowledged that our soldiers may have instead encountered "friendly" Afghan forces in the village about 60 miles north of Kandahar. In what stands so far as the understatement of the year for 2002, Rumsfeld said, "It is not a neat, clean, tidy situation" on the ground. Then yesterday, Karzai told reporters in Kabul that an unidentified supporter of warlord Bacha Khan - recently installed by Karzai as governor of Paktia Province - was the source of deliberately inaccurate information that led the U.S. military to target the convoy of rival Afghan officials as it proceeded toward Kabul for the Dec. 22 inauguration of the new Afghan government. Twelve people were killed. The Pentagon still asserts that the convoy was a legitimate target, and Rumsfeld on Monday indicated that the Hazar Qadam firefight may have targeted both friendly Afghan officials and Taliban remnants. "It may well turn out that in a situation like that, you will in fact have people who are friendly and people who are not friendly, and the people who are not friendly initiate the fire," Rumsfeld said of the Hazar Qadam firefight. "The return fire then comes in and ends up, unfortunately, killing or wounding some individuals that might have been friendly." May be. But a darker, more troubling possibility has also emerged. The Post and other news organizations have reported that two factions in the village - both of which are officially friendly to the Karzai government and United States, but not to one another - falsely accused the other group of being Taliban or al Qaeda fighters in order to unleash U.S. commandos against their rivals. Given the lack of success in tracking down bin Laden or Mullah Omar to date, our response was as expected. In came the Green Berets and D-boys and AC-130s, up in flames went the two arms bunkers, and out the window went any illusion that our clear battlefield victory over the Taliban has liberated us from the vicious faction fighting that has shattered and impoverished Afghanistan for nearly a quarter-century. To its credit, the Pentagon leadership has halted its initial attempt to bury the botched raid under clouds of cordite, brass shell casings and bovine supplements, and has directed Central Command to formally investigate whether we were misled into killing a bunch of Afghan fighters who were actually on our side. Central Command reportedly is reviewing the convoy air strike incident as well. Meanwhile, news reporters in Afghanistan reported this week that SOF units have apologized for the incident and have begun making monetary settlements to families of the dead Afghan fighters. The true "lessons learned" from Hazar Qadam and Khost are not the ones we heard two weeks ago: In "liberated" Afghanistan, our friends pose no less of a threat to the 4,000 American soldiers on the ground than the routed enemies we still pursue. Outside of central Kabul, the confusion of peace is still the fog of war. Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Table of Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Hack's Target For The Week: Anti-Terror Campaign Is No License to Steal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- By David H. Hackworth Sadly, most World War II vets, whose sacrifices brought us V-E (Victory in Europe) and V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, will hear taps long before we celebrate V-T Day (Victory over Terrorism). And the rest of our citizens will feel the pain of this terrible war for decades. Not only from more deaths and further disruption of the good life, but from the financial burden that will rob medical and social programs and tear up family savings. "In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare," wrote Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu more than 2,500 years ago. "Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war who can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on." For sure, this war will not be Desert Storm short. Long before Israel became a state in 1948, its people were fighting terrorists just as they are still doing today - with an end to the bloodshed nowhere in sight. But President Bush and his Pentagon wranglers deserve high marks for the well-aimed first shots fired and for gearing up to go the distance in this worldwide unconditional war against terrorism - that like cancer must be cut out wherever it festers - beginning with the countries they've retagged as this century's "Axis of Evil:" Iran, Iraq and North Korea. These repressive states have dealt in violence against free, civilized peoples for decades and should be taken out with the same speed and purpose as was employed against the last century's evil Axis - Germany, Japan and Italy. Members of the Bush team must not only fight smart but stay as sharply focused on containing the costs of this conflict as they are on finding and fighting the enemy. If they think the war's given them license to raid the public purse, they should revisit the Vietnam War and think again. Bush is seeking almost $400 billion for the Pentagon for next year and plans to increase the annual defense budget to about $440 billion by 2007 - more for guns and gunpowder than the rest of the world combined will be spending over the same period. Sure, our fighting machine has atrophied during the past decade and needs money in a bad way to take care of the troops, replace worn-out gear and transform the military into a leaner, meaner fighting machine with more unpiloted aircraft and ever-more-modern weapons. But we can't break Bank USA by using million-dollar weapons to kill $5,000 targets, as was done in Afghanistan. Nor can we allow the Pentagon to spend big on Cold War stuff - designed to take down the Soviet Union, which crashed a decade ago - like the half-billion-dollar heavy Crusader artillery system, the billion-dollar new reconnaissance helicopter, or the $5 billion budgeted to buy F-22 Stealth fighters. We don't need 800-ton gorillas to take out 30-pound rats. Most of the congressional porkers are afraid to stand tall and stop this the-enemy-is-at-the-gates spending spree. They don't want to come off as opposing a military buildup when their fickle constituency has war fever. And besides, there's the dough that'll be pumped into their states - not to mention their re-election coffers - for all this so-called "urgent anti-terrorist war gear." We've got to start putting our money in the right places, not the right pockets. Like making our cities and our ports of entry - air, sea and ground - terrorist-proof instead of wasting another $60 billion on Star Wars II. Why shouldn't our ports be at least half as tight as the Super Bowl? And why aren't the Marines, Special Operations, Coast Guard, FBI and Border Patrol more sensible investments than most of those gold-plated toys at the top of the Pentagon's shopping list? "In war, then, let your object be victory, not lengthy campaigns," Sun Tzu wrote. "(T)he leader of armies is the arbiter of the people's fate, the man on whom it depends whether the nation shall be in peace or peril." Our leader is George Bush. Let's hope he's read Sun Tzu, or at least listened to the LBJ tapes. http://www.hackworth.com is the address of David Hackworth's home page. Sign in for the free weekly Defending America column at his Web site. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, 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! Write to same address to be off 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! 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