| This article is a catastrophic journalism failure in that she managed to get pretty much everything either completely wrong, or omitted facts and details that she obviously didn’t bother to look into which tell the real story: “…50 minutes went by…”, indeed it did. The bulk of the delay was getting confirmation on friendly force locations from the field as that platoon had become spread out and another platoon was actively maneuvering to support them (if you are going to drop danger close, you better be sure where all the friendly forces are), on top of that, the aircraft executing the close air support targeted the wrong compound and the initial attack had to be aborted. As for the weaponeering, the Hellfire would not have been effective to use on a large compound. This “whopping 500 lb bomb” was a precision munition, fused to ensure the maximum mitigation of risk for friendly casualties; not to mention it was the quicker option given the current locations of aircraft supporting the TIC. Point of fact regarding the fratricide mitigation, there were two cows located inside the compound that survived the blast completely intact. As such, the Marines on the other side of the compound wall, 50 meters away, and down inside a canal were not at risk for fratricide. This brings me to my next point: Everyone in the Recon Ops Center knew where the Marines were, i.e. in the canal. Maj Galvin may not have known this (perhaps Ms West assumed that since he didn’t have this awareness then nobody did) because frankly he was not actively involved in this engagement. The article paints it that he was. However, after he made his recommendation for the Hellfire when it all started, which was not taken by the Battalion Commander, he sat in the corner at his computer and focused into the chat rooms. He was not actively communicating with the Marines under fire, and he was not part of the coordination of fires. Everyone else in the ROC was working feverishly to get fires coordinated and maintain compliance with the theater established ROE. Once all friendly forces’ positions were confirmed the Battalion Commander stated something along the lines of: “I want to end this NOW” and the air-strike was executed by the on scene JTAC. Immediately following the airstrike, the JTAC executed a HIMARS strike on another compound actively firing on the Marines. After that, the engagement was over. It did not continue for another four hours, and fire support was never denied. All of this information would have been available had Ms West bothered to investigate this story a little bit. I will say this though, her version makes for a great Oliver Stone movie script, but it simply didn’t happen. It portrays LtCol Homiak as a dithering fool, not the case, he was actually quite lethal when it came to employing supporting arms, he just didn't feel the need to level entire villages to make a point. |
