Hawkmoon, nothing you've posted changes the reality that the placement of IEDs is an efficient and effective method of killing American soldiers, damaging American equipment and tying up American manpower.
That's not to say that increasing the use of aerial surveillance will not result in some successes. In order to assess how effective the overall counter strategy of using such techniques will be, however, you have to pull back and take a look at the big picture.
Consider the cost and manpower requirements for building, maintaining, flying and analyzing the data provided by the planes and UAVs, consider the amount of land mass and roads that have to be covered, consider that the insurgents are now aware of the UAV tactics we employ so that they will no longer leave an easily tracked trail from the planting of an IED to their base of operations and consider that the IEDs are cheap, plentiful and can be installed quickly and easily, then ask yourself whether they'll continue to be an effective tool for the groups in Afghanistan that want to kill our soldiers and drive us out of that country.
In the years to come we'll still be looking for ways to minimize the tremendous damage we'll be suffering from IEDs and the military will still be touting their sporadic successes.
But every time we find a new counter strategy they'll find a way to circumvent the new counter strategy because they get to choose the when, how and where of their attacks and we have to defend against every possible time, method and place of attack.
Such wars are only "won" by our side if we can somehow get adequate "actionable intelligence." And guess what, in a country where our culture is foreign, our religious beliefs are viewed as dangerous and our credibility is dismal, we're years or never away from getting enough actionable intelligence to turn the tide.
I'm not saying that by betting the farm on changing Afghanistan, we couldn't do it. I am saying that there's not a good enough reason for America take that decade's long, low percentage, obscenely expensive and bloody bet.
The soldiers charged with clearing IEDs seemed to understand that. Ed |
