Dabum, I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just trying to paint a realistic picture. In Viet Nam we had awesome air power to support the grunts on the ground. If you were getting hit hard you could call in "puff the magic dragon," a fixed wing aircraft with gatling guns, rockets and the ability to saturate a football field with bullets in a few seconds. You could bring in fixed wings with a bomb or two and there were lots of cobra gunships on call that could lay down rockets and machine gun fire that looked like fingers of flame reaching to the ground. In a real tight spot you could call in a B52 bomb strike right next to your unit although that was something we saw only once and would never want to see again.
Where we were there were no targets off limits and if you were on the other side you sure didn't want to shoot at anything of ours in the air unless you were pretty sure you could shoot it down. There were "no fly" zones where the choppers wouldn't go because they would get shot down, but not many of those.
Even with the fact that we owned the sky, when you were on the ground you were not fully protected from the air. There were times when you could get wiped out with lots of air cover right over you. The tightest spots were when you were in close combat and the guys in the sky could not support you without hitting you as well. In effect they created a situation where the safest place for the bad guys was either way away or right in there with you. Trust me when I say that air power is great but it won't protect the guys on the ground in lots of different scenarios and in some types of terrain.
You make a good point by noting that the air cover in Afghanistan might not have to retreat. We probably have enough air resources and few enough ground operations there that we could have constant air cover.
Don't misunderstand me, I am a huge fan of our air capabilities. There's nothing like seeing hellfire come down on the bad guys when you need some help. There's nothing like having a chopper come in and pick up the wounded within 15-20 minutes after they get hit. Some of the gutsiest guys I ever saw were chopper pilots who would come in almost any where and almost any time to pull out the wounded without hesitation and at great risk to themselves and their crew. In spite of this, as I noted there are limitations on when and where they can protect ground troops.
As far as resupplies, from what I've been reading about the level of support that the Taliban have among the Arab people, including the moderate Arabs, it seems they will have some support. They can live and fight with meager supplies. If Viet Nam is any lesson, those people carried their supplies for hundreds of miles, lots of it on their backs, to get ammunition and food into South Viet Nam. In a limited war it doesn't take a lot to keep things going. I don't think we will be able to starve the population and if there is food for the population, it will get into the hands of the guys with the guns.
The bottom line is that if the people support the Taliban, and if they are determined to fight on, we will have a war on our hands as long as one guy with a rifle and ammunition still stands.
You said " Wanna bet what America's resolve will be if one of those suckers kills our troops?" One of the issues I was trying to raise was whether or not we wanted to put ourselves in the position of having that happen. If we continue to put troops on the ground it may be inevitable that we will not only have troops killed, but that they will be captured and killed in very unpleasant ways. In effect we are setting things up for our own "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Is that where we want to go? Is that the best long term policy?
I'm just talking to myself, partly because it seems to me there are no good answers yet and we at least ought to have a plan that considers that whatever can go wrong, will. Ed |
