War: What Can Technology Do For Us? 787
Both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, from Desert Storm to Kosovo, advanced the idea of conflict with little civilian loss and few casualties of our own. But thousands of American civilians are already dead in this conflict, greater civilian losses than in any war in U.S. history. Still, the military analysts, network pundits and Pentagon officials are going to great lengths to point out that Taliban and fundamentalist fighters are skilled and determined, that this conflict will be long and difficult, that our expectations should be kept realistic. And bin Laden is a surprisingly agile enemy. He not only grasps America's most vulnerable points, he understands "spinning," using video-imagery and satellite transmission to get his side of the story out. This is something Saddam never began to grasp.
But are our expectations realistic? Are we once again overrating our own technology, and underestimating less sophisticated cultures and populations? Most Americans have been prepared for years to place enormous faith in a range of new technologies that are supposed to make us the most powerful military force in world history. Sophisticated technologies devastated the Iraqi military in Desert Storm. While their results were more controversial in the Kosovo action, there remained little American loss of life. The bloody action in Somolia showed us yet again that technology is not effective if it can't be used for political or military reasons. And Panama and Grenada resembled police actions more than military conflicts.
In this new war, though, it seems clear that American forces will be involved in some sort of ground fighting on Afghanistan's murderous terrain, and that would mean a battle more reminiscent of Vietnam than Kuwait.
What can technology do for us? Can GPS targeting systems really place bombs that accurately? Can intelligence analysts in the U.S. instantly track raw data without leaving their offices? Can civilian populations really be protected? Can thermal imaging and satellite surveillance see into caves or track small units in mountainous terrains? Can government computers follow money around the world? Will our soldiers' tech-equipped vehicles, equipment and weapons give them an edge over the the Russians, who were chewed to bits in their conflict with Afghanistan guerrillas, but whose equipment was comparatively primitive? Have we actually developed a new mix of tech-supported human and machine warfare that is deadly, flexible and effective?
From reading the papers and watching the generals on TV, we see confidence from the military that the answers to most of these questions is yes. But the people reading this have a much better than average grasp of these tech issues. Do you agree? What can tech do for us -- or not do -- in this supposedly new era?
Use Nukes (Score:2, Interesting)
There is an article at wirednews titled "Nuke 'Em From On High"
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,47319,0
A couple excerpts of note:
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The most likely candidate is a tactical micro-nuke called the B61-11, an earth-penetrating nuclear device known as the "bunker buster."
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The design directs the force of the B61-11's explosive energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of several hundred meters, according to a story in the March 2, 1997 issue of Defense News.
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Any debate inside the corridors of power about using tactical nukes will be heightened by the intelligence buzz surrounding bin Laden's possible ownership of Russian nuclear "suitcase" bombs purchased from Chechen mafia.
Those weapons are said to be hidden in deep caves and fortified tunnels in remote regions of Afghanistan.
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Not Vietnam or Kuwait (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides.. this time they are after a terrorist and it's hosts not an entire country. And of course... it will not be the US alone. Don't forget that allmost half the entire world is standing behind the US. Off course.. if it takes too long support will weaken with the day...
In the end nothing will have changed though. Bin Laden will just be replaced by someone smarter. Smarter because he knows what he can expect. More intelligent because he will probably use more sophisticated means, not nescesarily technologically sophisticated but sophisticated nonetheless.
All our technology in spite we will never be able to root out all terrorism. Whatever kind of goggles we use...
Tech is useful, to a point. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tech should NOT give the other side an advantag (Score:3, Interesting)
Before you start criticizing individual acts within a war, look at the big picture first. What would cost more? Action or inaction?
And for those of you who believe that Osama is a reasonable man, please go over to FAS.org and read this:
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-f
...you just go ahead and try reasoning with this asshole. Those are his words, read them well. He is not a resonable man, and his ideals are not compatible with the existance of any other type of civilization.
It's the straw men again . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
"Most Americans are convinced that technology -- GPS targeting systems, thermal imaging, new intelligence retrieval systems, pilotless drone reconnaisance aircraft, high-altitude bombers, special forces equipped with goggles than can see into caves -- will carry the day for us. Will it? What can technology really do for us in this new war?"
Everything I have read, viewed or heard in the media, every poll I have seen, and every live human I have spoken with in the weeks since September 11 supports precisely the opposite proposition - the general public DOES NOT BELIEVE that technology gives the US/Allies the advantage in this war; it will be won, if at all, by traditional human intelligence, gritty casualty-producing ground combat, determination, and patience. And I don't hear anyone underestimating the low-tech Afghan mujahedeen.
Where are the "most Americans" who believe this is a magic tech silver bullet war? I don't see or hear them anywhere.
Re:For $600,000 a pop... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, please note that our forces are well equipped to deal with mines of that nature. The HTQ-67 & 68 land mines that the Soviets placed are expected to be 99% inoperable now. We have means to expose the few remaining mines that the US gave to them.
This is not what I had in mind... (Score:3, Interesting)
When we built all these fancy weapons, I thought they'd be used in a reasonably fair fight - that is, we'd send the tomahawks against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when they delivered their promised global revolution.
I didn't write all that code so that we could use it to kick over some mud huts in a stone-age nation bent on recreating a 16th century theocracy.
Granted, our jingoistic, bloodthirsty, home-grown perpetrators of atrocities are going after people of similar moral virtue, so at least we aren't knocking off Lapps, Tuvans or Bushmen... but I'd still like to see a fair fight. Let Bush and all his hawk buddies go fight a ground war, like the one he dodged in Viet Nam. I'll be happier about funding that, especially if we can use all-volunteer armies and ban all weapons more sophisticated than a bow and arrow.
Why can't all these warmongering bastards sate their bloodlust without bringing my nice clean superweapons into their dirty little terrorist tit-for-tat?
--Charlie
Bunker Busting Nukes (Score:4, Interesting)
In practiced Pentagonese, Rumsfeld deftly avoided answering the question of whether the use of tactical nuclear weapons could be ruled out.
Though large "theater" thermonuclear devices -- doomsday bombs -- don't fit the Bush administration's war on terrorism, smaller tactical nukes do not seem out of the question in the current mindset of the Defense Department.
The most likely candidate is a tactical micro-nuke called the B61-11, an earth-penetrating nuclear device known as the "bunker buster." The B61-11 was designed to destroy underground military facilities such as command bunkers, ballistic missile silos and facilities for producing and storing weapons. However, it could be used against the warren of tunnels and caves carved under the Afghan mountains that are often cited as a potential refuge for the U.S. government's prime suspect, Osama bin Laden. The B61-11's unique earth-penetrating characteristics and wide range of yields allow it to threaten deeply situated and otherwise indestructible underground targets from the air.
The 1,200-pound B61-11 replaces the 8,900-pound, nine-megaton B53 device, a bomb initially designated as an earth-penetrating weapon. The B53 is deliverable only by enormous and vulnerable B-52 bombers. By contrast, the relatively diminutive B61-11 can be delivered by the stealthier B-2 bomber, or even by conventional fighters such as the F-16.
The B61-11 is designed to burrow through layers of concrete by way of a "shock-coupling effect." The design directs the force of the B61-11's explosive energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of several hundred meters, according to a story in the March 2, 1997 issue of Defense News.
The B53, on the other hand, with a force equal to 9 million tons of TNT, penetrates the earth simply by creating a massive crater, rather than the more precise downward blow of the B61-11.
The B61-11 is the most recent nuclear device added to the U.S. nuclear arsenal since 1989. It was developed and deployed secretly, according to a story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The U.S. military sneaked it past test and development treaties, as well as public and congressional debate, by defining the B61-11 as an adaptation of a pre-treaty technology rather than a new development. Depending on the yield of the bomb, the B61-11 can produce explosions ranging from 300 tons of TNT to more than 300,000 tons. This is significantly less than the B53, but still far larger than even the greatest conventional non-nuclear device in U.S. stockpiles. And it is several times more powerful than the atomic weapons dropped on Japan in 1945.
Studies by the Natural Resource Defense Council estimate that more than 150 B61-11s are currently in the U.S. arsenals, scattered among NATO aircraft carriers and planes on bases in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Netherlands and Greece. Many B61-11s were withdrawn from Europe during the '90s and are now stored at Kirtland and Nellis Air Force bases in the United States.
According to a desk release from the U.S. Air Force's Public Affairs office, tests of the earth-penetrating capabilities of the B61-11 were completed on March 17, 1998, in frozen tundra at the Stuart Creek Impact Area, 35 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. Two unarmed B61-11s were dropped to test their ground-penetration capability. The tests were designed to measure the nuclear bomb casing's penetration into frozen soil and the survivability of the weapon's internal components.
A team excavated the two unexploded dummy bombs and took careful measurements of their angles and depth of penetration into the soil, which were 6 and 10 feet, according to the Air Force. The shells were sent back to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico for full analysis of how the simulated internal components fared in the impact. The B6-11's casing didn't rupture in any of the tests, including drops through concrete from 40,000 feet. All bomb casings were recovered 100 percent intact, according to the release.
Any debate inside the corridors of power about using tactical nukes will be heightened by the intelligence buzz surrounding bin Laden's possible ownership of Russian nuclear "suitcase" bombs purchased from Chechen mafia. Those weapons are said to be hidden in deep caves and fortified tunnels in remote regions of Afghanistan. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the discussion of ways to eradicate this potential nuclear threat -- while simultaneously destroying bin Laden and his teams --- may have led to talk about tactical weapons that can destroy even heavily fortified underground shelters.
benefit or hazard depending upon how blind we are (Score:2, Interesting)
Consider that when the F-4 Phantom was built, we relied so heavily on the technology of the radar guided missle that we thought there would never again be any dogfighting in the skies, and all kills would be done from a range of 25 miles away. And so, F-4 Phantoms were built without guns.
We got our butts kicked as a result with high losses as the MIG's tore the crap out of the Phantoms,
The next batch of F-4's had a gun built into a pod that would have been used to carry a missle. Suddenly the idea of building a manueverable fighter aircraft with guns was again, seen as a necessity. We learned that technology alone doesn't win a war.
The "Top Gun" school was started as a result of that embarassing mistake.
Let us hope that we still remember that painful lesson in this instance.
American Civilian Casualties? (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably the closest comparisons to prior conflicts can be made with the Indian Wars. During these conflicts between the US settlers and the Native Americans it is difficult to separate out the civilian casualties since much of the fighting was done by militias, etc. It should be possible to estimate civilians casualties for both sides in the Indian Wars by only counting women and children, and I would guess that the totals would be more than 6,000.
Of course the fact still remains that the number of civilian casualties that we've inflicted were much higher than those inflicted on us in the major wars of the 20th century. This is mostly a result of the fact that those wars weren't fought on American soil, but it bears consideration when trying to put the current conflict into historical context.
So many options (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing no one seems to mention is that every system has strengths and weaknesses, including the shadowy al quaeda. They may go to great lengths to keep their actions secret, but by the same token their communications are slow, infrequent, physical in nature, and (most importantly) difficult to authenticate, and even more difficult to organize. An opening in the network, restrained tracking and mapping of the network, and a tightly coordinated disinformation campaign could tear it completely apart. And that's just for starters.
One thing I noticed from the bin Laden video - he's just like Saddam Hussein or any other would-be dictator, using war to expand and consolidate his influence with himself on top. He's doing a credible job, although I think the media is overly-surprised at his control of spin - this is a man whose main purpose is recruitment. But the bigger he gets, the harder he'll fall, and his inaccessibility will ultimately be his undoing because he'll have no way to defend himself. He can easily be trapped and caught and/or badly discredited, with no way to defend himself, and in the process all the followers he's developed can be humiliated and shamed.
Tech's Role in this conflict (Score:2, Interesting)
That said, I think you will find that the tech involved in this conflict will be primarily oriented to command and control, recon and surveillence.
It appears that so far the "smart bombs" have done no discernable damage to the Al Queda network. Nor are such devices likely to work as they are designed to take out military assets, not individuals. Several experts believe that the US and its allies will rely heavily on special forces used on the ground. I tend to agree. The strengths of the Al Queda followers are the same as those of the muhjadeen - rapid strike ground forces that disappear after contact - hit and run tactics as explained by a former British SAS member who helped them refine their techniques. Those kinds of tactics cannot be fought by bombing an area into submission.
Wherer the tech does stand out however, is in tracking and locating friendly forces. GPS allows ground commanders and operational officers to know where their men are at any time. That is a great advantage for recon (When the enemy is spotted or engaged), evac (if troops are in danger). Enhanced communications and satellites will play further aid these processes.
Other less glamorous technologies such as night vision and short range heat trackers will lend a tactical advantage to ground forces (who will be more likely to attack their opponents at night), but again these aren't the high profile items that cost 5 and 6 figures each.
As for playing up the danger of conflict, that's been SOP for a long time. Remember the US government built up Iraq as the fourth largest military in the world (when it couldn't make a dent in Iran for 10 years). Technology's role in the military since WW2 has rarely created a paradigm shift, it merely increases the efficiency in which something can be done.
The fact that once again the most dangerous weapons US troops are likely to face are ones we sold our opponents doesn't help.
Re:Technology neither the problem nor the solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Take advantage of cheap cell phone technology (Score:2, Interesting)
This idea would show the terrorists a bit of the reality that they're working so hard against. It's the nature of people to want to be free and prosperous, and despots and dictators are working against that nature. The useful information we could get from anonymous "squealers" and the terror instilled in the terrorists' hearts would be two very potent weapons.
There's no need for the US to limit itself to expensive, marginally effective military technology. There are probably more solutions like this one that take advantage of the cheap technology our free market has produced.
----------- (Excerpt from the web site) -----------
Freedom Phones and PINs--How to Find Osama bin Laden and Other Terrorists with Methods that Guarantee Anonymity for Informants
Immediately after the WTC attack on September 11, many top scientists and Middle East experts in the U.S. suggested and recommended the anonymous reward scheme described below to encourage those with information on the identity and whereabouts of terrorists to provide this information to U.S authorities such as the FBI.
Dr. Bill Wattenburg gave the first public descripton of this clever scheme on his talk show over KGO Radio AM810, San Francisco, on September 25, 2001, from 7pm to 10pm. The response from listeners on the west coast was overwhelming understanding and approval.
Terrorists Leaders Will Know the Fear That They Can be Betrayed at Any Time by Captive Citizens Who Formally had no Secure Communication--or by Their Own Henchmen Who Can Safely Collect Large Rewards Here on Earth Instead of Only in Suicide Heaven.
The 'High Tech' you think you know is a joke. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, and I've got this nice bridge in New York I'm interested in selling. (Better buy it quick, though, before it gets blowed up real good.)
If anybody reading this site knows what the advanced military nations of the world are actually capable of, and if they were to write about it here, it would mean their immediate dismissal from the secret services and subsequent vaporization.
My information is about a decade old, but according to it, back in the early nineties, we had the technology to see through mountains, pinpoint kill from huge distances, and with shoulder mounted arms put nuclear-scale non-nuclear devastation pretty much anywhere at any time. I'll repeat that; NON-nuclear explosives which have the range and effect of nuclear devices. Small warheads a single warrior can carry and deploy. And that's just the brute force crap.
This stupid, evil, fake production of a pre-fab war could be won in under a month with little or no loss on the side of the tech-advanced nations.
And that's using tech from nearly ten years ago. (And you wonder why ZPE is dead in the civilian realm. Use your damned brains!)
However. . . You are not going to see a quick resolution because the power brokers don't want that. They plan to put on a good show which will establish all of the right dramatic tensions thus preparing and programming the world for the further steps of their master plan, (which if the world survives long enough, I am sure we will get to watch unfolding with all the melodramatic glory of a bad Hollywood film, written, of course, for the average 14 year old intelligence, because anything less would appear confusing and thereby deflate its core audience.)
Pass the popcorn. Erg. And the Tumms. (Lame writing gives me gas.)
-Fantastic Lad
Re:Tech should NOT give the other side an advantag (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for saying this. Half the time I watch the news, my roommate wonders why the hell I blurt out a "Shut the fuck UP!" every hour or so. (Side note - not all reporters are idiots; mad props to one reporter who, when questioned as to his whereabouts by his anchorman, replied with "Y'know, I think they said it was OK to tell you where I am, but I'm going to err on the side of caution for now. I'll tell you tomorrow.")
To Slashdotters reading this - you can help.
Do not post reports of military activity in your area. If you see lots of planes taking off from an airbase, or lots of planes landing, or lots of trucks moving about, or anything that might indicate our future plans, keep your mouth shut about it for a day or so before telling folks what you saw. Don't post names of people you know are on duty or being called up. Don't post unit numbers.
Exceptions can be made for breaking news, such as yesterday's intercept over Chicago, where our forces wouldn't be jeopardized. But I'm sure that anyone, with a moment's thought, can see the difference between "Holy shit, sonic booms over Chicago!" and "I wonder where all those planes and ships are going?"
Loose lips sink ships.
Re:Technology neither the problem nor the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Please begin thinking for yourself. I am tired of sophmoric pseudo-intellects regurgitating silly rhetoric heard by callers on NPR.
Why does Bin Laden have the right to tell America to leave the Islamic holy lands? Does he own all of it? Is he the elected representative of ALL the people? Does he even have the best interest of all the people in mind?
We have been asked to stay in the Holy Land by the governments of those areas. Granted, not all of these governments are democratically elected, but Bin Laden is not even "unfairly elected". He is nothing. He has no more right to tell the Saudis that they must ask the US to leave their land than he has to tell you to wipe your ass with a cactus.
We are protecting Kuwait. Iraq invaded them once, and would do it again if possible. We are assisting the Saudis (they're next after Kuwait, look at a map). Iraq still has a war machine hell bent on owning the entire peninsula.
Bin Laden does not care about the people of the Islamic world any more than Hitler cared about the Gypsies and Jews.
If he did, he would have worked to stop the war in Afghanistan - he has been living there for the past 8 years!
Bin Laden is a murderer. He defiles a beautiful religion. He wants to own the Arab world, and remake it in his image. He will murder whoever he can in order to accomplish this. He must be stopped. Our world does not need another (and another, and another) holocaust. There are already too many.
Re:I don't think there is much to worry about.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget your aluminum foil hat.
On a more serious note, suicidal fanaticism is not new in the world. No doubt technology has increased the potential damage such a person could do, but what happened on 11 September could have happened last year, or 1980 or even 1950 (with a different target, natch), but it didn't.
I guess the question I don't have an answer to is why now? The attack on September 11 was ostensibly in retaliation for U.S. support for Israel. Well, the U.S. has supported Israel since its inception.
No doubt the attack was planned for years, but why now? Is it because of George Dubya? It is because they finally _could_ pull it off, and would have done it years ago if they could?
There have been wackos in the Middle East spouting against the U.S. for years. Saddam promised us the "Mother of All Wars" and delivered a turkey shoot where his forces were surrendering to camera crews. Kaddafy got spanked by Reagan and we don't hear too much about him anymore.
Is there something fundamentally different or better (i.e., more effective) about bin Laden and his bunch or will they fade into obscurity once they get the good ol' Yankee smackdown. I mean how many people really want to throw their lives away just to make an irrational point, that they know won't change anything for them, just make a lot of other people miserable.
I guess we will find out.
Why is this funny at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, the US is already doing this in the name of "humanitarian aid" and "food dropping".
What I don't understand, is why they haven't dropped booklets in ARABICS as well.
Printing in English on the food packs is as stupid a move as you can make. With their literacy level how are they going to understand English?
USA MUST NOT enter retaliation game. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is because we're side to side in a map (I'm en Mexico), and because my work (computer-related) just can't be done other way.
First: I will not say that I dislike USA's way of life, to the extent that it does't get involved into other people's way of life. I don't like USA's standing in "our way of life it's the best, so we will impose it in every corner of the planet". USA must stop in doing so.
Second: Do you actually know what level of security is used to secure must Israel's airports, borders, even malls? you know that must of it came from USA? you think that USA is going to be more secure than Israel? (at every level, be it high-tech or militar), do you think that Israel, some day, some how, will be terrorist-free? do you think USA?
Third: USA has demostrated before, it's people is not prepared to deal with a long-standing war on terrorism on it's own soil. If the american people think that this war is going to be fighten in other place, they're mistaken. USA must realize that it is not going to benefit from this "new kind of war". Many countries are already wining it by means of not relating themselfes with middle-east. That's the way people. Stay off that area. Let Israel deal with Palestine.
I like USA the same way I like TCP/IP, it's there, is reliable, it sets a standard, you can use it, and certainly are better ways to do it, but if it begins to change into something that I don't like, It'll be years to have another standard to live on, and I don't know how could it be...
Re:Tech should NOT give the other side an advantag (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes the actions taken there were good but the party line over there is it was very late in the comming. Heck they even back that up now by pointing to how long it took America to respond to attacks on their soil versus the Saudi's in 1991 where they had oil interests (they mostly paint Saddam mostly as a puppet who was recieving US arms and aid even has he mounted troops on the border or a great man for paying the families of suicide bombers depending on the day and what's transpired)or Kosovo and Bosnia. So the moral of this for those fanatatics is make the attack hit homeland America. A poor one but that's unfortunately what they seem to be taking away from this.
Technology Doesn't Win Wars (Score:1, Interesting)
Bin Laden will not be taken out by cruise missiles, unless he gets really stupid. Some might say attacking the US was his first stupid move, but so far he's gotten away with it. He's got plenty of experience hiding out underground where bombs and missiles aren't going to reach.
In the end it will come down to forces on the ground, whether that is a SEAL team or a small army, I don't know, but that's what it will take to get at Bin Laden. No one should think that we will accomplish our objectives without sacrifice of lives. Sadly, most Americans these days seem to feel that there is nothing worth sacrificing their lives. They feel that a death is too high a price to pay for any end. Life is a wonderful precious thing, but sometimes sacrifices must be made. There are issues larger than life. There are forces more powerful. There are fates worse than death. If you can't think of any, than you've already lost hope.
PREINT (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago, I was working at a dot-com on some really fascinating "intelligent" software. It would pull out abstract information from unrelated data and form n-dimensional "clouds" where related entities would become grouped toegther. It would then proceede to "find faces" in the clouds. In other words, it would try to extrapolate out new information based on what information it was given, no matter how much or how little.
It was a simply amazing tool for data analysis, for pulling out the relevant information from a sea of data, for making educated guesses that actually give you results... But like all dot-coms, we frittered our money away and now I don't know if more than three people in the world even have copies of this once multi-million dollar software.
My point is, if we as a no-nothing dot-com can come up with a really fantastic data mining/information extrapolation engine (of course, we used it solely for short-sighted evil-marketing purposes, thus our demise), then the government could certianly be able to build a system fifty times as complex, and use it for vastly more important purposes than correlating CDs with clothing purchases.
The next step for military technology isn't going to be the next biggest bomb or the pair of night-vision goggles that will let you do macramé in a cave during a new moon. Instead the next advance will be predictive and learning software that can make "good guesses" as to when and where the enemy will strike next. It will be able to profile everyone in the world based on thier credit-card purchases corelated with thier taste in web-sites, thier shoe size, and how many hours of bowling they watch a year, and be able to spot the "sleeper" terrorists with a 99.982% degree of accuracy. It will be able to analyse battlefield data and predict troop movement, ambushes, and caculate the plan of action that would lead to the biggest victory with the smallest loss of life.
Don't get me wrong, though, high-tech gadgetry will play a role in the war, of course, but to delude ourselves into thinking that all we need is Rambo and night vision will just lead us straight back into Vietnam, or if you're a Russian, Afganistan...
Re:Tech should NOT give the other side an advantag (Score:1, Interesting)
I think that the 10th Mtn to Uzbekistan was a feint, the last piece. All prior to Sunday was to convince the Taliban to send their forces north, get them out into the open and manouvering, and give them a nice Mk82 bitch slap.
What we don't seem to grasp in the US is that the SpecFor (Delta Force, SEALs, Green Berets, GSG-9, SAS, etc.) are the most efficient enforcers in the civilized world. The Rangers are the epitome of the US Infantryman. The SEALs and Special Forces are the epitome of the civilian SWAT teams. They pretty much hate toe-to-toe fights and aren't really equiped for it, but they do love the flip side.
There is no hope for the old way (i.e., send in the 3rd Armor Division and 82nd Airborne). The Soviet Union and Britain showed us how well that works in Afghanistan. We'll have to fight them at their level (Wouldn't it be ironic if more than a few field-grade US SF officers were there in the 80's as enlisted/jr officers fighting against those they advised?)
SWAT teams are the closest civilian equivalent most of us can grasp. The SF mission will be very police-like: surveillance, tracking, HUMINT and the occaisional raid. What happened in Somalia with our Special Forces there was what happens when you get complacent: We assumed the Somalis were just a bunch of Khat [sic] freaks, that we could keep operating the same way and no one would figure it out, and that the apparant size of our units would keep everyone at bay. Well, it didn't work out that way (read "Blackhawk Down", for you perspectively-challenged). They got off-mission that time, and paid badly for it. Rumor has it that bin Laden had a hand in helping them out there with that...
Cops shouldn't play soldier, nor should soldiers play cop, for any long period of time.
I think that we learned a lot from Somalia, in the right circles, and like the Iran Hostage Rescue, it won't happen ever again...
They learn, yes. But if we allow our troops to, and our troops don't get operationally complacent, then so do our troops...and we have better supply lines.
KATZ == JACKASS; (Score:2, Interesting)
Excuse me? There was sacrifice aplenty in Iraq, just not on our side of the battle. And there will be LOTS of people killed in this war, just most of them won't be Americans.
You're right to question the correctness of our reliance on technology for this, but for the wrong reasons.
Really! (Score:2, Interesting)
"As technology advances, every activity has the potential to be more efficient, whether it's killing people or mowing the lawn."
There! Saved you a few dozen words, too! Or, if you prefer reductio ad absurdum:
"When your method of doing something advances, you do more of it faster."
The Real War (Score:2, Interesting)
A Marine friend of mine suggests they're already on the ground. Their mission may be to simply identify targets, and to use the confusion of the attacks to discover exactly where Bin Laden and his buddies are hiding.
Once those mountains are blown to bits, they would probably follow to identify bodies and kill the survivors (if any).
That may be the initial hope, but my guess is that even if they do identify hidey-holes, they won't be able to blow 'em out from the sky, and we will have to go in with significant numbers of troops.
It's at that point that the sciences involved in insulation come into play. Any skier knows we've made great strides in that area in recent decades. I think the snow might actually turn into an advantage. But I'm an optimist.
Even assuming all goes well, Afghanistan is just one home to terrorism. There's still Iraq. There's still Syria. There's still Iran, and Iran is (in some ways) a democracy.
The key to all the rest of the propaganda war. And that's a war I fear we're not winning. We don't have to convince 90% of Americans we're right. We have to convince 95% of Muslims that their Fundamentalist preachers are wrong. Otherwise we're just raising a new batch of terrorists.