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.
Did I say that it did? Of course it's cheap, so long as the IED builders have access to both the explosive material, and free access to emplace them.
But a Molotov Cocktail is even cheaper and gasoline and parrafin is far more ubiquitous. Russian and French partisans used Molotov cocktails to great effect in destroying expensive German tanks.
Building IEDs, and especially remote detonated ones, take a bit of expertise that is still at a premium in Afghanistan. That's why it's critical to spread around a bit of cash to your sources to gain information, patrol and overwatch the MSRs with UAVs, and conduct kill/capture raids on the bomb-making cells.
If it's your intent to assert that we're spending too much money to safeguard and protect the lives of our soldiers, you've made a convincing argument.
I'll support your nomination for SecDef and you can tell the troops that we're going to go back to thin-skinned vehicles like the Jeeps and Half-tracks we used in WWII. And be sure to tell the tankers that we're going to fight light, fast, and on the cheap, which means we need to carve about 20 tonnes of Chobham armor off their metal steeds.
And since our soldiers are wasting so much ammunition with automatic fire, we'll go back to semi-automatic weapons only.
And we don't need digital commo gear either. Let's all just go back to Handie-Talkies and stringing commo wire.
And those Jets dropping JDAMs and laser guided bombs? We'll.. let's re-open the P-51 and F4U Corsair production lines and go back to piston engines (actually a good argument for this) and drop lots of really cheap unguided "dumb" bombs.
Is that cheap enough for you?
The point being that we won WWII against far greater odds than this, using very inexpensive gear that offered very little protection for our soldiers (and over 300,000 soldiers died as a result).
Count the cost in metal, but not the value in lives saved, right? Flesh is expendable, just has it has been in the past, right?
Again.. you make a damn good argument. It's certainly the "capitalist" way of waging war.. preserve your hard assets and exploit the labor force (the soldiers).
Hawk |
