🚀 go-pugleaf

DeadMeat wrote:

> 
> "Dharmananda" <Nil@neph.net> wrote in message
> news:1204636.UY531aNM1O@news.verizon.net...
>> DeadMeat wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > I understand what Overwhelming Firepower is. That's where a bomb is
>> > dropped on a house housing your enemy. Or where you have the troops
>> > come in behind a couple or three M-1s that blow the 2nd floor, 3rd,
>> > 4th, and fifth window on the 2nd and third floor completely away. Hell,
>> > kid, it's done all the time and it saves lives on the US side. If you
>> > overkill it then it's still dead and you lost NO people in the first
>> > place. If you underkill it your ground troops are going to get some
>> > pretty nasty surprises.
>> >
>>
>> That makes sense.  But then why is it, pray tell, that one of the other
>> military geniuses on this thread assures me, on the basis of war blogs,
>> that this doctrine, i.e., overwhelming firepower, is outdated?
> 
> Easy answer.  They either repeat what they are told while on base or they
> just make it up as they go.
  

Right.  So why get your shorts in a bunch about doctrine at all, whatever it
was trying to be, if you're just going to throw it out the window, as soon
as you get into combat?


> Either way, their's is just an opinion just
> like yours is.
  

Look, these guys are highly trained war machines.  Ask them.  They'll tell
you.  They're not supposed to have opinions like civilians like me. 
They're supposed to have a set of instant, and often lethal, reactions,
hard-wired into the cortex of their brains, according to a set of
perceptual grids called Doctrine.


> Not a single one of them will ever be involved in
> Overwhelming Force.
 

Hello?  Doctrine is Doctrine.  If you're in the military you recieve it.  If
you didn't, you'd be dead.


> That's normally left, these days, to the Air Force,
> Navy or Marines who have the Air and Sea Power on hand.  They might (not
> likely with these guinuses) be involved in moving in aftewards to either
> sweep up or clean the place up of the last vestages of resistance.
  

Where, oh where have you BEEN for the last fifty years?


> Don't
> get me wrong, the clean up can be quite deadly and should be avoided
> whenever possible. 
 

Which is the primary place where the whole Doctrine breaks down.  "If you
break it, you then have to fix it".  (Powell's famous 'pottery shed
principle')  And to fix it, the bombardment has to cease.  And then guess
who is still there?  Even if you've succeeded in bombing every existing
insurgent at the time of the attack to smithereens, that very bombardment,
in and of itself, just made fresh insurents out of all the male relatives
of every one you killed.


Bad Doctrine!  Bad, bad, bad!


> While the use of Overpowering or Overwhelming force is
> being used, it's the enemy that normally dies.  But during the cleanup,
> you have to send in your own troops and that is never anticeptic.


Let alone fresh outbreaks of civil disorder throughout the Sunni triangle. 
The enemy didn't die in Fallujah.  Largly, he escaped.  Who died was
innocent civilians.

BAD DOCTRINE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




-- 
Triratanam sharanam gaccami
Dharmananda

http://mysite.verizon.net/res6zeam/american-buddhist/news.html