They can try.
Posted on 11/09/2009 10:57:35 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A soldier turning on his comrades at Fort Hood, an Afghan policeman killing the British soldiers who trained him - two uncannily similar events in two days, but incidents which, across the Western world, security authorities have been planning for and dreading.
Since the Mumbai attacks counter-terrorism planning has seen a major shift. Those charged with thwarting or reacting to future terror attacks were alarmed by Mumbai. The shootings in Afghanistan and Fort Hood carry echoes of the atttacks in India with the added danger that the enemy has come from within.
The new-style of attack relies not on the suicide bomb, or the al-Qaeda adherence to massive casualties, but on the shock of a gunman, or a handful of gunmen, opening fire in a place where people felt safe and secure - the luxury hotel, the police base, the US Army camp.
Lord West, the Security Minister, told a Commons committee last month that the prospect of such an attack in Britain was at the forefront of his mind. The minister said he and his team were "doing a lot of work" on "the Mumbai issue". He painted a bleak (and rather prophetic) picture of what might happen: "It is extremely difficult in an open society to stop there being initial casualties, if you have some men who have been trained to military standard, three or four of them, with relatively heavy weapons.
"The damage they can cause in the first few minutes is dramatic. One has to use other methods of intelligence and the agencies and all of these sorts of things; because if it gets to the stage where they are actually on their 159 bus going up Whitehall carrying that [firepower] you have got a problem."
They can try.
Do nothing to upset terrorists. i.e., Lay down and die.
Let them go for it.
For want of a sheepdog, political correctness just cost the U.S Army a platoon, i.e. 13 KIA and 30+ WIA, not counting death benefits and medical care, not to mention legal costs of prosecuting the perp.
It's time to kill political correctness and quaint ideas that don't work like gun free zones. If NCOs can't be trusted with sidearms, they shouldn't be NCOs. I can understand the Army having reservations about junior enlisted troops, but they are also denying those troops their right to self defense while they allow themselves to be infiltrated with jihadis.
“The damage they can cause in the first few minutes is dramatic.”
There-in lies the problem. If it takes more than a few seconds for someone with matching force to put suppressive fire on the perp, then the OODA loop is stalled at the Act stage long enough for mayhem to be successful.
Put another way, any time there is delay in the feedback loop (and here the feedback is to return fire to the threat) there will be failure to control. This is true of social control situations as much as with a servo mechanism. The dial-911 mentality always creates delay by removing the authority to act from the knowledge that there is a problem to be countered.
Fortunately these attacks are rare, so the policy is seen as pragmatic. The policy’s effects on general social morals and character is far more corrosive than its failure as a practical security matter.
Specialization and division of labor works most efficiently and effectively in so many situations that the fallacy is in believing that self-defense can also be delegated to specialists. Centrally planned constraints and solutions will never solve this problem. At some point trust in individuals has to be applied.
let the plebes shoot back ???
youbetcha this is a runup for more 'common sense' 'pelosi'...
pelosi = bs...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.