by Jack
CONT-
A close up look at who we were fighting after Saddam: The insurgency was well motivated and they had no shortage of good weaponry. Leadership was fair to good, but if you have to summarize them, they were no comparison to average US soldier in training or equipment. What they did have was the home field advantage and that would prove to be decisive in many ways.
Here’s what the average Iraqi carried: AK-47’s rifle, a short range automatic rifle. A few hand grenades or C-4, mostly used for booby traps and about 200 rounds of ammunition. They had almost no body armor. Usually one or two within these small fighting units would have an RPG with a couple of rockets and not much else. These soldiers were cheap to equip and they were highly motivated which made them reasonably effective.
Their mission was to ambush and disappear into the local neighborhoods that they knew well. Catching them was like a game of wack-a-mole.
(Actual “Story Board” list shown on left - a cache of IEDs and weapons found by US Army troops)
These guys did not pose much of a threat to heavily armed rifle squad, where the real threat came from was their IED’s. Did you know that 80% of our battlefield casualties came from IED’s and not firefights?
The core of Iraqi resistance came from the financers of bomb-making factories. The bomb makers and their bomb placers were a huge problem. Poverty motivated many of bomb placers, actually they were called ”emplacers” and they often did it just for the money. Typically a bomb factory would pay $30-50 to plant a roadside IED. But, the emplacers took the big risk because they were dirt poor and few had any love for the coalition forces that had “freed” them from Saddam’s tyranny .
“Standard bomb-making equipment showed up again and again in the caches, including: multimeters for checking the electrical continuity in circuits; personal mobile radios for transmitting firing signals; switches to close circuits; electric blasting caps; detonating cord for when multiple charges were used.” NY Times 2010.
Bomb makers were creative to say the least. They would often strip the timers from washing machines, or they bought them by the hundreds from commercial sources. Motion sensors meant to open grocery store doors or to turn on security floodlights also found their way into bomb-maker supply bins. These devices could trip a switch and initiate an explosion when a soldier crossed their path.
According to Army experts, the single most lethal weapon we faced in Iraq was one I bet you never heard of, it was the explosive-formed-penetrator or EFP.
E.F.P. warheads required some skill to make. They required a milling machine and a heavy press. E.F.P.’s form “slugs” at detonation that maintain their shape over distances of over 100 yards or more, traveling at speeds of nearly a mile per second and they can punch a hole in most of our armored vehicles. They became known as “Iranian weapons” because Iran passed E.F.P. technology to the Lebanese militia “Hezbollah,” and they passed it on to proxy groups fighting in Iraq. The E.F.P.s arrived in kit form, and these were hand-packed with plastic explosives by bomb makers in Iraq just before use, they often used American C-4 which is readily available on the global market.
On our side, the troops used the best in body armor and helmets, made from Kevlar. Kevlar would stop most slow projectiles, those travelling at or less than 900 FPS. Unfortunately, most types of body armor was not very effective against 7.62 X 39 AK rounds fired from within 100 yards. This was a heavy .30 cal. bullet, than ran out of gas after 200 yards, but at close range it was deadly.
The US body armor did protect from most fragmented explosives, pistol rounds and AK rounds fired from a great distance. But it was the explosive concussion that we couldn’t defend against. Blast concussion killed and caused serious brain damage to many soldiers that were too near an IED, mortar round or RPG.
The US forces used the M4 rifle and it fired a 5.56 X 45. This was far more accurate than the AK rounds, especially at long range, but the problem was knock down power. This round is a .22 bullet that travels at high speed (about 3000 FPS), and it has a steel core that punches neat little holes. It just wasn’t a great round for knockdown power like a .30 cal. bullet fired from an AK. But, the .308 NATO round was much better all around, and preferred in sniper rifles. However, a sniper could be firing anything from a .308 up to a .50 cal., depending on his preference and the mission specs. Snipers using a .50 cal. could easily take down a target at a half mile and the bullet had enough punch left at that distance to put a hole through a cast iron engine block. The Iraqi’s had nothing to match our high quality sniper weapons, the best they had was the old USSR era Druganov semi-auto sniper rifle that had slightly less punch that a NATO .308 round.
The array of US weapons compared to the insurgency’s was almost endless! Aside from our armored vehicles and aircraft, we had a weapon for every combat situation, including the world’s best artillery pieces. We would later turn this artillery over to the Iraqi National Guard and they would in turn leave them behind when ISIS approached. Now ISIS can hit targets from 20 miles away.
We re-learned a lot of hard lessons in Iraq, but if there was an upside it greatly improved our fighting ability, from our generals on down. Our weapons, training and combat skill is now far and away the best in the world. If we have to go back to Iraq to clean up the mess Obama created ISIS won’t stand a chance. And based upon the releases from GITMO of hard core A-Q terrorists, I would seriously doubt our troops will be voluntarily bringing back any ISIS fighters for incarceration.
What else did we learn from our experience in Iraq? Well, we learned war hasn’t changed much, it’s still bloody as Hell and therefore we need to think long and hard before getting sucked into another one.
Casualities: There were 174,000 Iraqis reported killed between 2003 and 2013, with between 112,000-123,000 of those killed, being civilian noncombatants. However, it’s hard to account for civilian deaths, several agencies said the death toll for Iraqi’s was closer to a million and most of them were civilians.
A total of 4,491 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2014 and there were over 52,000 wounded in action. The Iraq war cost us over 2 trillion dollars and costs are still coming in. Obama walked away from sacrifice. He created a void in power that allowed ISIS and like it or not, we have a moral duty if not a national security duty to take out ISIS one way or another, but ISIS can’t be allowed to take hold in Iraq and Syria.
Last lesson: “Rethink U.S. grand strategy, not just tactics or methods. Because it is not clear if any U.S. approach would have succeeded at an acceptable cost, the real lesson of Iraq is not to do stupid things like this again.” (Foreignpolicy.com)
I believe we learned these lessons of never ending war in Vietnam. I am confused. Even Cheney talked about what would happen if we went into Iraq in 1994. Said it would be A quagmire. Why is there a new lesson now? This has been discussed before we ever went to IRAQ, next on their books ? BiBi wants Iran war.
We are repeating history. What we have done is ignore the warning of General Eisenhower and allow the Media to run real truth into ales pitches.
Everything is not about left and right. That is their distraction. Money is made off war period.
Ever read PNAC? JEB Bush was one of more than two dozen prominent political figures to sign PNAC’s founding statement of principles,.
Among PNAC’s 25 charter signatories were several people who would become senior members of President George W. Bush’s administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Peter Rodman, Paula Dobriansky, and Elliott Abrams.
Who has Jebby Bush hired for advisers? The gang is back. Read PNAC Jeb has never denounced it, it is just secret
PNAC…scary! Their stated goal:
American principles of freedom and rights are needed in the world. we have no imperial ambitions but wish to see others free and prosperous. And you, Dewey, think this is a bad thing?
Your belief that these men are evil is ridiculous!
Military strength is necessary in a world where ambitious tyrants spend like crazy on building military strength at the expense of their people. Military strength doesn’t automatically translate to war. As Reagan showed, military strength creates power to negotiate, even with people that have vowed to destroy you. The wall came down and the cold war ended without a shot being fired. those gains have been squandered in the last six years…pathetic!
Think tanks don’t advertise…there is nothing “secret” about this one.
Globalization is of course a terrible thing, and I am completely opposed to it–unless, of course, we’re in charge and my country is on top, then globalization is good and right and just.
Re : “I am confused.”
Obviously considering rambling, distorted, and disjointed posts you make.
Re #2 : Tina
PNAC is hiding under my bed!
“The Project for the New American Century ceased to function in 2006.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Dewey’s consistently hysterical conspiracy theories are hilarious. The poor kid’s distorted rhetoric identifies him as a Communist, and not a very good one at that.
pie back at ya, You follow your media to the wonderful utopia of fake free markets! There is a crash looming have fun.
That document calls for America to dominate the globe through military force….
Pie you have no clue I would take you on in a public debate any day, Independent fact checker, Fox facts would loose my friend find another source
The plan shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power.
It says: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
The PNAC document supports a ‘blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests’.
This “American grand strategy” must be advanced for “as far into the future as possible”, the report says. It also calls for the US to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” as a “core mission”.
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/pnac-signer-endorses-jeb-bush-real
http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/corporate-media-doublethink-and-the-bush-pnac-911-iraq-connection/
Off topic, but one of the reasons I’m liking Ted Cruz more and more.
Cruz Moves to Fine State Department for Illegally Withholding Key Iran Report:
http://freebeacon.com/politics/cruz-moves-to-fine-state-department-for-illegally-withholding-key-iran-report/
“The Project for the New American Century ceased to function in 2006.”
And as we all know, conservatives would never continue fearmongering about organizations they don’t like long after they’ve been disbanded.
*cough*ACORN!*cough*
😉
The problem are the communists like Dewey and Chris.
People all over the world hate us for our freedom and values and these communists refuse to acknowledge that. We’ve got to kill them over there before they come over here to kill us. The war on terrorism goes on forever. I’m a patriot! Praise the troops!
Well said Joe and so true.
Today’s leftwing socialist is really yesterday’s communist rebranded to sell better.
Over the past 40 plus years, I have watched this nation sink lower and lower until I can see our ruin looming ahead. The country is abused and disrespected by rabid flag-burners, divided by racist-baiters and frauds and our wealth is exploited and stolen by liberals.
Today, we have fallen so low that we have more wage-takers than wage-earners. The liberal government schools has repeatedly failed to produce a good product. The foreign competition is killing off “made in America” and the tax and spenders in Congress made that possible. Well we are first at a few things, for instance, we are number one for the world’s highest corporate tax rate and we number one for the most imprisoned population. Thanks to the liberals and open borders, virtually 1/4th of the population of Mexico has moved here and in so doing they’ve brought Mexico’s corruption, poverty and crime problems with them.
The direction this country is going is absolutely, positively, not sustainable; we’re another Greece, times a 1000 and when (not if) we fall there will a global depression unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
The very best we are doing right now, right at this very moment, is managing the rate of our decent into chaos, but not its inevitability.
I have went back and forth on this issue, trying very hard to be optimistic. I’ve tried to believe in a return to the conservative values that founded this nation, but in reality I see nothing to indicate this is ever going to happen, short of a violent revolution. It appears we’ve passed the time where trying to get any meaningful reforms through legislation had even a remote chance.
So many people today are thinking just like me, but the government isn’t listening. Many of us think now that for all intents and purposes we really only have one political party, with two factions, and those factions aren’t far enough apart too make a wit of difference for our future our survival. It really looks like neither side is capable of saving us. This feeling is rampant among our voters and it is evidenced by all the dropouts from the two main parties. The new class of independent voter is growing faster than either the dems or reps. And then we have those who are no longer voting. It is way too large, and that ought to be a huge red flag to our representatives that our democracy is near cardiac arrest.
My guess is, once the boomers are gone the last line of resistance is gone. Then the country will fall. It will either go under in bankruptcy or it will be morphed into a socialist state by subversion. We will then be treated like cattle.
I’m sorry if this is depressing, but this is how I see it and I hope for our sakes that I am wrong.
Perhaps Mr. Orwell was on to something.
And Mr. Harvey as well…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-SRQWpLkQ
Jack, I am fairly certain Joe’s comments were intended satirically, but it says a lot that it’s hard to tell these days.
“Today, we have fallen so low that we have more wage-takers than wage-earners.”
This is not true.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/28/terry-jeffrey/are-there-more-welfare-recipients-us-full-time-wor/
“Well we are first at a few things, for instance, we are number one for the world’s highest corporate tax rate”
Only technically. The effective tax rate is very low due to all the loopholes.
“and we number one for the most imprisoned population.”
True. Let’s end the drug war and all privatized prisons.
“Thanks to the liberals and open borders, virtually 1/4th of the population of Mexico”
This is not only false, it is ridiculous. I’ve shown you the fact check on this before; I am not sure why you are making this crazy claim again.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/02/ann-coulter/no-us-has-not-taken-14-mexicos-population
Perhaps the real problem with this country is that so many of its citizens believe absolutely crazy things.
Chris this boring…I checked my facts and they are right, yours are wrong. A new report from the Census Bureau showed a total of 108,592,000 people were on some sort of means-tested government benefits program in the fourth quarter of 2011, yet only 101,716,000 people were employed full-time for the entire year.
I didn’t claim exactly 25% of Mexico’s population had moved north, but pretty close. Politifact is not the last word on everything.
#12 RHT447 :
“Perhaps Mr. Orwell was on to something.”
Agreed. Given that Orwell was a democratic socialist who opposed communism and capitalism, I feel my political views align with his pretty well.
#11 Jack, could not agree with you more. Our Constitutional Republic is dead gone, replaced with a progressive socialist European style gov’t from which there is no return to what the Founders left us.
My summer reading are two books I highly recommend.
#1 – The Fourth Turning:
“An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.”
http://store.lifecourse.com/products/15/The-Fourth-Turning.html
#2 – By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission
“The American way of life, built on individual liberty and limited government, is on life support.
American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government—not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, “Try to fight this, and we’ll ruin you.”
In this provocative book, acclaimed social scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray shows us why we can no longer hope to roll back the power of the federal government through the normal political process. The Constitution is broken in ways that cannot be fixed even by a sympathetic Supreme Court. Our legal system is increasingly lawless, unmoored from traditional ideas of “the rule of law.” The legislative process has become systemically corrupt no matter which party is in control.”
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/by-the-people-charles-murray/1119435308?ean=9780385346511
How many warnings do we need to get before corrective measures are taken?
New CBO Director Renews Warning on Long-Term Debt:
“In its latest warning the country is headed for a long-term debt crisis without a major spending course correction, the Congressional Budget Office reported on Tuesday that the debt would surge to over 100 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product by 2040 or a lot higher if current optimistic economic assumptions prove wrong.The gloomy message from CBO’s new director, Keith Hall, varied little from repeated warnings from his predecessor Doug Elmendorf that the administration and lawmakers must avoid complacency during the current surge in the economy and declining annual budget deficits.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/06/16/New-CBO-Director-Renews-Warning-Long-Term-Debt
This is not something to be proud of to leave our children and grandchildren.
Peggy, thanks for links and book recommendation.
Re Dewey and Chris : Sometimes you just have to laugh at the Soros boys.
Jack: “Chris this boring…I checked my facts and they are right, yours are wrong. A new report from the Census Bureau showed a total of 108,592,000 people were on some sort of means-tested government benefits program in the fourth quarter of 2011, yet only 101,716,000 people were employed full-time for the entire year.”
I’m sorry, but copying and pasting a sentence directly from Townhall.com is not “checking your facts.”
The numbers did not say what you and the right-wing blogopshere claim they said.
If you actually look at the Census and BLS figures themselves, not right-wing bloggers’ interpretation of them, you will see that the Census counted 108,592,000 people who were living in a household with someone who was on welfare–NOT 108,592,000 people who were recieving welfare.
The 101,716,000 number was the number of full-time employees.
Do you see that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison? If you are going to count everyone living in a household with a person on welfare, you can’t then compare that to the number of individuals with a full-time job. Either compare individuals with individuals, or households with households.
What Townhall–and, frankly, the entire right-wing blogopshere–did was to take the numbers from the Census, then compare everyone living in a household with a welfare recipient to every individual full-time worker. That’s not an honest or fair comparison. That is deliberately manipulating statistics to further a political agenda and misinform people. They inflated the numbers
The right-wing blogosphere failed basic statistics on this one.
Not to mention they’re ignoring the fact that many of the people counted as being on welfare ARE working. There is significant overlap. The attempts by the right to act like these are mutually exclusive categories is divisive and ignorant.
“I didn’t claim exactly 25% of Mexico’s population had moved north, but pretty close. Politifact is not the last word on everything.”
I never said Politifact was the last word on everything. But they lay out the facts very clearly in this case. If you examine the figures in an objective manner, you will see that Coulter manipulated them much in the way others manipulated the figures on the welfare to work comparison.
Here is the Pew study Coulter cites to back up her claim that America has taken in 1/4 of Mexico’s population:
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/06/19/hispanics-of-mexican-origin-in-the-united-states-2011/
“Mexicans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Mexican origin; this means either they themselves are Mexican immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Mexico.”
Did you get that? “Mexican origin” means that someone traces their roots back to Mexico. In order to get her 1/4 number, Coulter counted every single person of Mexican origin in the United States as a Mexican immigrant. That is ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. Any informed person knows that doesn’t make any sense. But no informed person would take statistics peddled by Ann “9/11 widows are greedy harpies” Coulter seriously in the first place.
You have got to start looking more closely at the numbers and the criteria used to get them, Jack, rather than just believing what people with an agenda tell you.