AMERICA AT WAR
At Salem the Soldier's Homepage ~
Posted on 05/19/2004 8:56:56 AM PDT by presidio9
There could be several reasons for no air support. The attack helicopters could have been committed elsewhere or - as things had been peaceful up until this point - there would have been a lot of red tape involved. The unit had to be alerted for the mission and permission would be needed to use them in the urban area. For this someone “higher up” would have had to check out the situation personally, given the command (possibly as high as Centcom if not higher). The orders then would be passed back down the chain, op orders written up etc.
Remember that this has turned into a CYA operation.
dude, have you seen this?! Good stuff!
It was 5 magazines of 20 rounds, now probably 5 magazines of 30 rounds - 150 rounds available. Even with a couple extra mags, it wouldn’t last long. Mechanized infantry has the means of acquiring and carrying a lot more - the tracks can hold a lot.
See post #75
Been there, done that.
LOL I wouldn't really know. I went through IOBC (Infantry Officer Basic Course) as a mech-man but my duty station was the 9th Infantry Division, one of the last remaining "light" divisions in the army. For awhile I was a TOW missile platoon leader, but the TOWs are said to mean "Tired Of Walking!" Eventually we became the army's High Tech Test Bed and got to test the SEAL Dune Buggies and the now common Humvee.
“Combat support troops frequently don't know how to do that.”
We often did not have the frequencies or call signs, being told we wouldn't need them.
A test and evaluation that sounds like fun!
All I got to test was proposed combat boots - by walking 500 miles on a test track at Fort Meade.
holy crap. Why don't these guys get air support?
Next time I'll read your post before posting!
The fact is that MOST convoys pass through without incident. MOST convoys have no enemy contact at all. And I've convoyed through Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Anaconda, and Baghdad unarmed and in an unarmored SUV.
And for the poster that asked, it was 106F at midnight about a week ago when the winds were hot from the south and blowing dust all over. Those storms lasted the best part of the week and culminated last Saturday. The rest of the time has been into the high 90's already.
Excellent excellent read that explains what happened that day in a part of Iraq. A few uneducated comments of this poster who has never been in the military:
1. Most people here need to pay heed to R. Scott's posts. He is terse, terser than me and I am terse, but he is on point if you think about what he is saying.
2. Everyone also needs to understand that 9 April is the beginning of a change in Iraq. For month up to then things were calmer and calming down. Then the situation exploded.
3. Per the point that Poohbah and R.Scott were making, it is likely air support was dealing the possibility of colalition troops losing control in al Najaf and other places where Sadr's supporters were causing even more problems. As I remember the Italian or Spanish troops were in very serious trouble and they had trouble defending their base?
4. Newbomb Turk I agree we are paying now for minimizing Iraqi civilian casualties. Had we put these people in the position of post WWII Japanese or Germans where their main worry was getting enough food to survive the winter, they would be much more docile. But this time we want to act as if the problem was the leader not the citizens. In WWII we blamed the Germans and Japanese. I also agree with IDontLikeToPayTaxes that we may be back in Iraq with unconditional surrender demands in two decades as was the case with Germany from 1918 until 1941. I am not saying this is not a risk the US should not have taken, but it is a risk associated with minimizing civilian causualties.
A very interesting post and thread. Too bad old media is not able to cover the war on terror and we have to rely on new media to cover it.
Good Grief! I'm exhausted.
One more point that I meant to make:
I saw a show, probably on The History Channel, that as someone says in an earlier posts, US Soldiers are just not conditioned to shot at Women and Children. It is not easy for them to overcome their conditioning. They can over time, but early on it makes situations like this more dangerous for them. And of course a war where you have over come your conditioning leads to excesses too.
Glad to hear he is alright. Thought he was up in Mosul with 3/2.
He is, in or near Mosul. The soldier in this story is with the 724th out of Bartonville, Illinois and so is Steve. 22 members were deployed in Aug.including Steve and a few months later the other 105 members were deployed. He knows all of them. This Lieutenant (He only has refered to him as Matt) was among his best friends. Lives in Chillicothe, Illinois
I am curious about Matt's status. He had just been hired by the police dept. and then was activated. I'm thinking that he won't be getting his job back because of the loss of his eye.
I don't know about the 724th Trans Co., but in my experience most CSS units do not think in terms of pre-planned fires, target reference points, what batteries are in range of what points on the route, etc.
In my humble opinion Army Aviation is poorly equipped to support convoy operations. UAV's preceding the convoy would give early warning of mischief up ahead, but no Trans companies will be getting UAV's any time soon. Propeller-driven, fixed-wing light attack aircraft dedicated to route recon and QRF on every MSR is what we need, but Army Aviation doesn't have any of those and the Air Force doesn't want that mission. We need our Mohawks back.
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